"...But how does the install work if the Perc drive has yet to be installed?..."
Usually ESXi is not installed on main storage, but rather on usb-stick, compact-flash card, small ssd, or similar flash medium (some servers have already slot for it on motherboard, check yours). Basically it is nothing wrong with having ESXi and VM-datastore on the same storage, but it is always a good idea to keep them separated (i.e. if you later want to update driver for your perc-controller, it is safer to have it off-line).
If your motherboard/server is supported, installation on USB/CF should be no problem.Then you update ESXi with new drivers, smis-providers, etc, and after that your perc H710-controller is detected and ready to be used (if it was not recognized during ESXi-installation). Finally you create local datastore on that H710-array, format it, and use for VMs.
Just FYI, I personally use two small CF-cards (with CF-to-SATA adapters). On both of them I have (most of time) indentical copies of ESXi, but they are not in raid1, and act as safety-feature: If i screw esxi-patching somehow up and system does not start (or does not find datastore), I just reset server, go to bios, switch boot-device to the other CF and start with previous (unpatched) ESXi-version. I can do all this using remote-KVM, and it really did save me once (my server is in colo-center ~100 miles away)...
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If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! 😉
