Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The i nal method for deploying ESXi—using vSphere Auto Deploy—is the most complex, but
it also offers administrators a great deal of l exibility.
Deploying VMware ESXi with vSphere Auto Deploy
vSphere Auto Deploy can be coni gured with one of three different modes:
◆
Stateless
Stateless Caching
◆
Stateful Install
◆
In the Stateless mode, you deploy ESXi using Auto Deploy, but you aren't actually installing
ESXi. Instead of actually installing ESXi onto a local disk or a SAN boot LUN, you are building
an environment where ESXi is directly loaded into memory on a host as it boots.
In the next mode, Stateless Caching, you deploy ESXi using Auto Deploy just as with Stateless,
but the image is cached on the server's local disk or SAN boot LUN. In the event that the Auto
Deploy infrastructure is not available, the host boots from a local cache of the image.
The third mode, Stateful Install, is very similar to Stateless Caching except the server's boot
order is reversed: local disk i rst and network second. Unless the server is specii cally told to
network boot again, the Auto Deploy service is no longer needed. This mode is effectively just a
mechanism for network installation.
Auto Deploy uses a set of rules (called
deployment
rules
) to control which hosts are assigned a
particular ESXi image (called an
image
proi le
). Deploying a new ESXi image is as simple as modi-
fying the deployment rule to point that physical host to a new image proi le and then rebooting
with the PXE/network boot option. When the host boots up, it will receive a new image proi le.
Sounds easy, right? Maybe not. In theory, it is—but there are several steps you have to accom-
plish before you're ready to actually deploy ESXi in this fashion:
1.
You must set up a vSphere Auto Deploy server. This is the server that stores the image
proi les.
2.
You must set up and coni gure a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server on your
network.
3.
You must coni gure a DHCP server on your network to pass the correct information to
hosts booting up.
4.
You must create an image proi le using PowerCLI.
5.
Still using PowerCLI, you must create a deployment rule that assigns the image proi le to
a particular subset of hosts.
Auto Deploy Dependencies
h is chapter deals w ith ESX i host installation methods; however, vSphere Auto Deploy is dependent
on Host Profi les, a feature of VMware vCenter. More information about installing vCenter and
confi guring Host Profi les can be found in Chapter 3, “Installing and Confi guring vCenter Server.”
