Sometimes you need to boot a system into Safe Mode. But with a virtual machine you don’t have enough time to put a Windows system into Safe Mode. To put a normal system into safe mode, you can just hit the F8 key when Windows is booting. But with a virtual machine the BIOS screen is by default set to go away in 0 settings. Therefore, you need to add a boot delay to mimic a physical host. To get a virtual machine in ESX to have such a boot delay, view all the virtual machines and then right click on the virtual machine you need to configure a delay for.
Next, click on Edit Settings and then click on Option. In the options screen, click on Options and then Boot Options. At the Boot Options screen, set the Power-on Boot Delay to 5000ms, which will give you a 5 second delay. Given that 5 second delay you will be able to click on a booting virtual machine and then press the F8 key. From here, open the console window for the virtual machine and start the boot process.