VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.install.doc/images/GUID-805C76A0-0DF7-4A85-96D3-F183F4E2A175-low.png' alt='Install Esxi From Pxe Server' title='Install Esxi From Pxe Server' />Sphere 5 How to run ESXi stateless with v. Sphere Auto Deploy. Briefing question 35147 Which vSphere feature automatically optimizes resource utilization and responds to workloadrequirementsA. Storage IO ControlB. A great new feature of v. Sphere 5 is the possibility to run ESXi stateless. Long, long time ago when ESX 3. Updated on. ESXi 6. Update 2 ISO Build 3620759. Check for additions and updates to these release notes. VMware is the global leader in virtualization software, providing desktop and server virtualization products for virtual infrastructure solutions. ESX on the local harddisk or SAN disk. With ESX 3. 5, the first ESXi version was released but only few were using it. Welcome to vmhelp. Unofficial VMware ESX Server Whitebox HCL. If you have any questions or comments, you can leave a comment on one of the pages or. ESXi and vCenter Server 5 Documentation VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server 5 Documentation VMware vSphere Basics VMware vSphere and Virtualizing the IT. Do not want to install AD, DNS, DHCP then just install the Microsoft 208r2 Transport sever by itself and still deploy. Boot PXE with Transport Server. With 4. x ESXi really got a large install base and more and more people were moving to installing ESXi on USB or SD card. Now with v. Sphere 5 and ESXi as the only hypervisor no more ESX, we dont need to install ESXi at all. When running ESXi stateless, the host will PXE boot and load an ESXi image into memory. There is no more need to have local disks, SD card or USB on your host. Another advantage is that you can now switch the ESXi version the host is running by just rebooting or refresh the host configuration with a reboot. Adding new ESXi hosts to your cluster has become a task of just a few minutes. Lets have a look at how to configure auto deploy. This blog post will take you through the steps of setting up the required infrastructure and prepare an image and deploy it to a host. My series on VMware v. Sphere 5 Auto Deploy v. Sphere 5 How to run ESXi stateless with v. Sphere Auto Deployv. Sphere 5 Auto Deploy PXE booting through Cisco ASA firewall. Updating your ESXi host using VMware v. Sphere 5 Auto deploy. My first Auto Deploy design for real production environment. Important When running stateless, your ESXi host cannot boot without all v. Center Auto Deploy components being active. Changes are big that your v. Center Auto Deploy is running in a virtual machine. Should your whole environment power down, you will have a problem getting everything running again. Personally Im thinking of having an extra USB install of ESXi 5 at hand at all times. Just in case. The bigger the environment the smaller the chance this will happen. But especially for some home lab environments this might be something to think about. Infrastructure. When using Auto Deploy a host will use DHCP to get an IP address and learn if there is a PXE boot server. The PXE boot image is downloaded and the pre boot environment is ran on the host. It will now contact the Auto Deploy server which will now check the rule engine. Based on the rules in the rule engine an image is now offered to the host and a host profile is applied to the host. An image is based on a VMware ESXi deployment image combined with optional extra VIBs VMware Image Bundles. You can download a ready to deploy image of ESXi from the VMware download site, just like you would download your normal ESXi install files. For example the latest ESXi version I could download in the beta, was build 4. The normal ESXi install to download would be VMware VMvisor Installer 5. VMware ESXi 5. 0. This is an ESXi image suited for auto deploy, containing the ESXi VIB. It is also possible to combine VIBs into a new image if needed, for example when you want to add extra drivers or special VIB supplied by the hardware manufacturer. Another component is the Image Builder Power. CLI. Using Power. CLI commands a rule set is created and together with a host profile connected to a host or number of hosts. To make all this possible you need to have the following in your environment Hosts that are capable of running ESXi 5. TFPT boot server. DHCP DNS server. Windows server to run Auto Deploy or v. Sphere v. Center Appliancev. Sphere Power. CLIThe v. Center Auto Deploy manual will show you how to enable the v. Sphere v. Center Appliance for Auto Deploy. Bus Hound 6.01. In this post I will use a Windows server to act as TFTP and Auto Deploy server. Installing TFTP server. To keep things simple I downloaded the Win. Agents TFTP server. It is a 3. 0 day trial. Installation is a simple next, next, finish. Create a directory on your Windows server, for example E tftproot and make this your TFTP root directory. Set up DHCPTo be able to PXE boot, you need to set some options in your DHCP scope. Open the scope on your DHCP server and add the following options 0. Boot server host name   lt ip of your TFTP PXE boot server. Boot file name undionly. Set up v. Sphere Auto Deploy. On the v. Center installation media youll find the Auto Deploy software. It can be installed on your v. Center server but you can also run it on a separate Windows server and have it point to your v. Center server. I kept everything, including the TFTP server, on my v. Center host. Installation again is a simple next, next, finish in which you only need to supply the IP of the v. Center server and the correct credentials. After the installation has finished you can install a plug in in your v. Sphere Infrastructure Client. You can see the Auto Deploy icon on the home tab. Install TFTP boot image. The last step is now to add a boot image to your TFTP server root directory. In the v. Sphere client click the Auto Deploy plug in and see the following page Now choose to download the TFTP Boot Zip and extract this ZIP file into your TFTP root directory. With this, the first part is ready. To test if things are working, you can boot an ESXi host or just for test boot a VM. Make sure that the host or VM is using PXE boot. You should see that it is assigned an IP address and it starts loading a TFTP image. Next youll see that although a TFTP image was loaded, there was no ESXi image associated with this host. This screen also displays a number of Machine attributes we could use later on when tying a rule set to a host. Installing v. Sphere Power. CLIWell this should be a piece of cake since I expect many of you to have done this many times before. Download the v. Sphere 5 Power. CLI and install it on the server on which you will be working with your images. To test if your VMware Power. CLI is working, start the VMware v. Sphere Power. CLI command prompt and run Get Deploy. Command. This should give you a list of all the commands youll need to work with Auto Deploy. After this youre done and all requirements for v. Sphere Auto Deploy have been installed. Preparing your first image. When installing v. Sphere Auto Deploy, youre asked for a directory for your Software. Depot. This might be a bit confusing since it actually is never used by YOU, only by the Auto Deploy software for internal housekeeping. My advice is to also create a directory called VIB downloads in which you store the VIBs and images you want to deploy. First well deploy the basic VMware ESXi 5. Well attach the image to the host based on mac address and want the host to show up in your v. Center in a folder named Staging. Since it has no configuration, I dont want it to show up in a cluster yet. All the info we need IP address of the host and the DNS hostname. Folder name StagingMac address 0. Image name VMware ESXi 5. VMware siteImage name ESXi 5. Important Since well be using DHCP to assign a fixed IP and hostname to the host, you need to create a DHCP reservation for the mac address. In your DHCP scope create the reservation and use the proper hostname. In DNS create an A record for this hostname and IP address and make sure you give it a PTR reverse lookup record too. Adding a new image to your depot. This is what confused me during my first steps with v. Sphere Auto Deploy. I was doing all sorts of things trying to add the VMware ESXi 5. I copied the whole zip into it, but that didnt work, unzipping and copying didnt work either. Until I learned that you dont do anything with the software depot directory.