Designing vCenter Server for Auto Deploy

If you are looking for provisioning 100s of ESXi hosts in your datacenter and don't know how to rapidly provision those then Auto Deploy is your answer. With Auto Deploy, you can specify the image which will be used to provision the ESXi hosts. Also you can specify/configure host profiles which will help you to get those hosts configured if you need those identical and add them to a vCenter Folder or Cluster.

Auto Deploy uses a PXE boot infrastructure in conjunction with vSphere host profiles to provision and customize that host. An ESXi host does not store any state information rather Auto Deploy manages that state information. Auto Deploy stores this state information of each ESXi host in different locations. When a host boots for the first time, the vCenter Server system creates a corresponding host object and stores the information in the database.

However in ESXi 5.1, VMware introduces two different features along with stateless ESXi, those are...