vSphere Auto Deploy
vSphere Auto Deploy—often just referred to as Auto Deploy—is, like vSphere Update Manager, a tool designed to help VMware administrators rapidly automate and streamline the process of deploying ESXi images to physical hosts within their vSphere environment. By combining the boot infrastructure abilities of PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) with vSphere Host Profiles, discussed previously in Chapter 3, an administrator is no longer required to build a kickstart file or directly install ESXi on each individual host. Auto Deploy provides a centralized configuration plane for the state of the hosts. Each time a host is rebooted, its image and configuration will be picked up from the Auto Deploy services and the associated Host Profile, respectively, and loaded into memory, resulting in no physical state being preserved on the hosts.
The following requirements must be met before you can use Auto Deploy to install ESXi on your hosts:
- PXE and TFTP boot environment...
