Thanks. I don't believe that will save us much time though.  The point is to try and do as much as possible prior to going to our DR site, so we do not need to spend up to two weeks in another state re-installing ESXi in our entire environment while there.  I believe with the kickstart script, it may save a few minutes not having to configure the management network manually, but you still need to edit the script with the IP information for each host. 

I believe it used to be possible to have ESXi installed on a USB drive that could be used swapped and used on another same model host, in case of hardware failure, which would seem to indicate there isn't anything in the ESXi installation that ties it back to a particular physical server.  If we were to install ESXi on the M.2 flash drives without any configuration (no management network config, etc, just the base install), then install those flash drives to our hosts at our DR site and configure ESXi once we've installed flash drives in the servers, should that be ok?