Recently while playing around with my NAS I noticed a setting for a couple of interesting little items.

  • TFTP Server
  • Syslog Server

Now the Syslog was simple enough to set up and test…

However with TFTP that was a little harder to test since I had no images to test with… until vSphere Auto Deploy!

Since I’ll be doing my VCP5 exam in a couple of weeks I thought it was probably prudent to have some practical experience in all the new features. Auto Deploy is effectively a network (PXE) boot / provisioning service for ESXi servers. I’d like to call out Duncan’s Auto Deploy “scribble” he penned a few months back, it helped me get a few of the more puzzling steps sorted out. So onto the steps required:

1. Install Auto Deploy

It’s a pretty standard “next -> next -> finish” installation from the vCenter media. The only question worth bringing up is the Auto Deploy Repository max size. According to VMware this should be “allocate 2GB to have enough room for four image profiles and some extra space“.

2. Configure TFTP & DHCP

As mentioned, I noticed the TFTP Server feature of my Qnap NAS a while back, not wanting it let it go to waste I decided to give it a little VMware love. Again, this is simple stuff, just enable the feature and give it a directory that it can read boot files from. Once that’s configured download and extract the TFTP Boot Zip file from the vSphere client into this new directory.

After the TFTP is configured it’s time to ensure the DHCP server is passing on the boot settings, namely the “Boot Server Hostname” and “Bootfile Name“. This will depend on the flavour of DHCP server but for Microsoft the screenshots spell it out. The “Bootfile Name” is listed on the vCenter Auto Deploy screen (same place the Boot Zip file is located).

3. Image Creation and Booting

If a new VM was created now, it should find the Auto Deploy server and… yeah that’s about it. We need to create an ESXi image and assign it to Auto Deploy.

The instructions call to download the “Offline Depot” from VMware, particularly a file called “VMware-ESXi-5.0.0-469512-depot.zip“. This however, is not possible (any longer) with only a trial license associated to a VMware Account. However after a little digging around I found out that you don’t actually need to download the file. You can add a network based software depot instead:

Add-EsxSoftwareDepot https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

Once we have the software depot added to our environment it’s time to build a base image. Since we’re doing it in a lab the computer model is a VM:

New-DeployRule –Name “FirstTimeBoot” –Item “ESXi-5.0.0-469512-standard” –Pattern “model=VMware Virtual Platform”

Then the we can assign this image to be deployed and test booting a VM from the network:

Add-DeployRule -DeployRule FirstTimeBoot

As you can see it’s pretty simple to set up once you know how. I actually think this is one of the new features where VMware have over complicated their documentation but, I do prefer too much than too little!

There’ll be a post on configuring the newly deployed ESXi server with Host Profiles at another time.