8.0

To provision the hosts in your environment with vSphere Auto Deploy successfully, you can follow
these steps.
1 Deploy vCenter Server.
The vSphere Auto Deploy server is included.
2 Configure the vSphere Auto Deploy service startup type.
See Prepare Your System for vSphere Auto Deploy.
3 Install PowerCLI, which includes vSphere Auto Deploy and vSphere ESXi Image Builder
cmdlets.
See Install Prerequisite Software and Configure vSphere ESXi Image Builder , Using vSphere
Auto Deploy Cmdlets, and Using VMware.Image Builder Cmdlets .
4 Find the image profile that includes the VIBs that you want to deploy to your hosts.
n Usually, you add the depots containing the required software to your PowerCLI session,
and then select an image profile from one of those depots.
n To create a custom image profile, use vSphere ESXi Image Builder cmdlets to clone an
existing image profile and add the custom VIBs to the clone. Add the custom image profile
to the PowerCLI session.
You must use vSphere ESXi Image Builder for customization only if you have to add or remove
VIBs. In most cases, you can add the depot where VMware hosts the image profiles to your
PowerCLI session as a URL.
5 Start a PowerCLI session and connect to the vCenter Server system that vSphere Auto Deploy
is registered with.
6 Use the New-DeployRule PowerCLI cmdlet to write a rule that assigns the image profile to
one host, to multiple hosts specified by a pattern, or to all hosts.
New-DeployRule -Name "testrule" -Item image-profile -AllHosts
See Assign an Image Profile to Hosts.
Note vSphere Auto Deploy is optimized for provisioning hosts that have a fixed MAC address
to IP address mapping in DHCP (sometimes called DHCP reservations). If you want to use
static IP addresses, you must set up the host profile to prompt for host customization. For
more information, see the vSphere Host Profiles documentation.
7 Power on the hosts that you want to provision.
8 Set up the host you provisioned as a reference host for your host profile.
You can specify the reference host syslog settings, firewall settings, storage, networking, and
so on.
9 Set up the host you provisioned as a reference host for your host profile.
VMware ESXi Installation and Setup
VMware, Inc. 126