Installation guide

See your hardware vendor documentation for information on changing boot order.

Installing, Upgrading, or Migrating Hosts Using a Script

You can quickly deploy ESXi hosts using scripted, unattended installations or upgrades. Scripted installations,

upgrades, or migrations provide an efficient way to deploy multiple hosts.

The installation or upgrade script contains the installation settings for ESXi. You can apply the script to all

hosts that you want to have a similar configuration.

For a scripted installation, upgrade, or migration, you must use the supported commands to create a script.

and edit the script to change settings that are unique for each host.

The installation or upgrade script can reside in one of the following locations:

FTP

HTTP/HTTPS

NFS

USB flash drive

CDROM

Enter Boot Options to Start an Installation or Upgrade Script

You can start an installation or upgrade script by typing boot command-line options at the boot command line.

At boot time you might need to specify options to access the kickstart file. You can enter boot options by

pressing Shift+O in the boot loader. For a PXE boot installation, you can pass options through the

kernelopts line of the boot.cfg file. See “About the boot.cfg File,” on page 119 and “PXE Booting the ESXi

Installer,” on page 87.

A ks=... option must be given, to specify the location of the installation script. Otherwise, a scripted

installation or upgrade will not start. If ks=... is omitted, the text installer will proceed.

Supported boot options are listed in “Boot Options,” on page 110.

IMPORTANT After you upgrade or migrate your host to ESXi 5.0, you cannot roll back to your version 4.x ESX

or ESXi software. Back up your host before you perform an upgrade or migration, so that, if the upgrade or

migration fails, you can restore your 4.x host.

Procedure

1 Start the host.

Chapter 6 Upgrading and Migrating Your Hosts

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