6.7

Setting Up a vSphere Auto Deploy Reference Host
In an environment where no state is stored on the host, a reference host helps you set up multiple hosts
with the same configuration. You configure the reference host with the logging, coredump, and other
settings that you want, save the host profile, and write a rule that applies the host profile to other hosts as
needed.
You can configure the storage, networking, and security settings on the reference host and set up
services such as syslog and NTP.
Understanding Reference Host Setup
A well-designed reference host connects to all services such as syslog, NTP, and so on. The reference
host setup might also include security, storage, networking, and ESXi Dump Collector. You can apply
such a host's setup to other hosts by using host profiles.
The exact setup of your reference host depends on your environment, but you might consider the
following customization.
NTP Server Setup When you collect logging information in large environments, you must
make sure that log times are coordinated. Set up the reference host to use
the NTP server in your environment that all hosts can share. You can
specify an NTP server by running the vicfg-ntp command. You can start
and stop the NTP service for a host with the vicfg-ntp command, or the
vSphere Web Client.
Syslog Server Setup All ESXi hosts run a syslog service (vmsyslogd), which logs messages
from the VMkernel and other system components to a file. You can specify
the log host and manage the log location, rotation, size, and other attributes
by running the esxcli system syslog vCLI command or by using the
vSphere Web Client. Setting up logging on a remote host is especially
important for hosts provisioned with vSphere Auto Deploy that have no
local storage. You can optionally install the vSphere Syslog Collector to
collect logs from all hosts.
Core Dump Setup You can set up your reference host to send core dumps to a shared SAN
LUN, or you can install ESXi Dump Collector in your environment and
configure the reference host to use ESXi Dump Collector. See Configure
ESXi Dump Collector with ESXCLI. You can either install ESXi Dump
Collector by using the vCenter Server installation media or use the ESXi
Dump Collector that is included in the vCenter Server Appliance. After
setup is complete, VMkernel memory is sent to the specified network server
when the system encounters a critical failure.
Security Setup In most deployments, all hosts that you provision with vSphere Auto Deploy
must have the same security settings. You can, for example, set up the
firewall to allow certain services to access the ESXi system, set up the
security configuration, user configuration, and user group configuration for
VMware ESXi Installation and Setup
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