Auto-Deploying Stateless and Stateful ESXi Hosts

In a large environment, deploying ESXi hosts is an activity that requires a lot of planning and work. For instance, if you were to deploy a set of 25 ESXi hosts in an environment, then you might need more than one engineer to perform this task. The same would be the case if you were to upgrade or patch ESXi hosts. The upgrade or the patching operation should be done on each host. Of course, you have the vSphere Update Manager, which can be configured to schedule, stage, and remediate hosts, but, again, the process of remediation would consume a considerable amount of time, depending on the type and the size of the patch. VMware has a way to reduce the amount of manual work and time required for deploying, patching, and upgrading ESXi hosts. It's called vSphere Auto Deploy. In this chapter, you will learn how to not only design...