Testing Auto Deploy

Now that we have deploy rules created, let's boot up an ESX Server in the subnet and check if it is able to fetch and load the image from the Auto Deploy server.

How to do it…

Start the machine intended to host the ESXi server. If everything has been configured correctly then it will PXE-boot and will start loading the VIBs into from the cache to the server's memory.

Once it is done, it will load all the VIBs to the memory and it will finish booting up the ESXi server.

As per the deploy rule, it should add the host to the Cluster-21-25 cluster. You should also, see it applying the Host Profile to the ESX Server.

How it works…

Now that we learned how to Auto Deploy an ESXi server, it will be beneficial to understand what happens in the background during the first and the subsequent server boot-up operations.

First boot

When a machine chosen to be provisioned with ESXi is powered-on, it does a PXE boot by fetching an IP address from the DHCP server. The DHCP scope configuration...