Deploying Hosts with Auto Deploy
Autodeploy is split into five steps in order to achieve stateless boot of an ESXi host. With each operation configured and in place, the process looks something like this:
- When the physical server boots, the server starts a PXE boot sequence. The DHCP server assigns an IP address to the host and provides the IP address of the TFTP server as well as a boot filename to download.
- The host contacts the TFTP server and downloads the specified filename, which contains the iPXE boot file and an iPXE configuration file.
- iPXE executes, which causes the host to make an HTTP boot request to the Auto Deploy server. This request includes information about the host, the host hardware, and the host network. This information is written to the server console when iPXE is executing, as you can see in Figure 4.33.
FIGURE 4.33 Host information is echoed to the server console when it performs a network boot.
- Based on the information passed to it from iPXE (the host information...
