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 - ...

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