Creating vSphere Auto Deploy rules

Once the environment has been prepared to PXE boot, the next step is to configure vSphere Auto Deploy to install ESXi on the hosts. This is achieved by associating ESXi images with specific hosts or groups of hosts. Such an association is achieved by creating Auto Deploy rules, which uses supported patterns such as a MAC address, asset tag, serial number, vendor, domain, gateway address, and so on.

In this recipe, we will learn how to create and activate deploy rules.

Getting ready

Before you begin, you will need to prepare the image profiles that need to be used for deploying the hosts. You will also need the host profiles to be created/imported and placed in vCenter in order to configure...