Auto Deploy
vSphere Auto Deploy is a cool feature that came out with vSphere 5. It allows you the ability to provision hundreds of ESXi hosts at a time. You specify the image to deploy, which hosts to provision, a host profile for the settings, a target vCenter Server, and cluster, and voila, you'll have your ESXi host provisioned in no time! Once Auto Deploy is configured, the ESXi hosts will use a PXE boot infrastructure paired with host profiles to provision and customize the hosts. This can be configured for stateless, stateless caching, or stateful.
Let's take a look at the three types of Auto Deploy setup:
Stateless - the image resides in the memory; no local disks needed. PXE infrastructure will always be used for boot.
Stateless caching - introduced in vSphere 5.1, this feature allows you to cache the ESXi host's image locally on a host disk or a USB device. The ESXi host will continue to boot using the PXE infrastructure unless its unavailable, at which point it would boot from the...
