I've had issues with my locally attached disks being incorrectly identified as "remote" multiple times in the past. To make sure that I'm getting the local drives, I specify the driver for the internal controller as the --firstdisk.
install --firstdisk=mptsas
Because I'm ultra paranoid, when I'm working on a blade server that has no easy way to "unplug" the storage network from a single blade, I have a custom image created using Image Builder CLI from which I have removed the HBA drivers, so that my remote disks can't possibly be detected during ESXi installation. Then my firstboot script will install the required driver.