When installing vCloud Director in my homelab, I ran into an issue where the vCloud Director Agent cannot be installed into the ESXi host since the host is ran using VMware Auto Deploy. Installing that agent is useless because after a reboot, the ESXi host would be clean again. In vCloud Director you’ll be presented […]
Auto Deploy
Auto Deploy GUI – a new VMware Labs fling
On the VMware Labs pages you’ll find a number of great Lab projects, so called “Flings”. These are unsupported projects by VMware employees you can download and use. One of the latest VMware Lab Flings is the “Auto Deploy GUI” created by Massimiliano Daneri which makes auto deploy of your ESXi hosts a breeze. As […]
My first Auto Deploy design for real production environment
Last week I was asked by a customer to build a new VMware vSphere 5 infrastructure in which they would like to use Auto Deploy for the ESXi 5 hosts. Of course I told them that Auto Deploy was a first release but I didn’t push that too hard, because designing and deploying it for […]
Updating your ESXi host using VMware vSphere 5 Auto deploy
In my previous post on VMware vSphere5 Auto deploy I explained how to setup an auto deploy environment. This is great for initial setup and to deploy your hosts, but what when an update is released by VMware? The easiest thing is to just delete the deploy rules and recreate them which is ok for […]
vSphere 5 Auto Deploy PXE booting through Cisco ASA firewall
In response to my blog post on “vSphere 5 – How to run ESXi stateless with vSphere Auto Deploy“, I received a comment from Rob Ellison, who ran into issues when PXE booting through a Cisco ASA firewall. In a second comment he explained how he solved the issue. Turned out there was an issue […]