Has been using auto deploy feature for a while for my small esxi clusters.
Here’s is a tutorial: http://osdude.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/diskless-esxi-vsphere-5/
Here’s some other stuff I found extremely useful.
1) Where do I get a “vmware image depot file” ?
You can get vmware patches as the depot file here:
http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/download.portal
Select esxi5 and download the patch as offline depot, because esxi always patch the whole firmware, you always get the latest one.
But better way doing this is : vmware have a online depot! use following when following instruction to create your own image profile
Add-EsxSoftwareDepot https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
2) add Vmware HA depot too, it contains the HA agent, which I wonder why they didn’t include them in the first place
Add-EsxSoftwareDepot http://<vcenter server address>/vSphere-HA-depot
Remember to create your own image profile and add the packaget to it, otherwise your newly boot machine will have to install it every time reboots.
Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile "MyProfile" -SoftwarePackage vmware-fdm
3) Now, the fun stuff. Say a new patch comes along, and you updated your imageprofile , updated your deploy rule and updated your deploy ruleset, reboot the machine and found nothing changed. Right, You need to fix the cache! Do this in powershell :
Get-VMHost <hostname> | Test-DeployRuleSetCompliance | Repair-DeployRuleSetCompliance
4) Host Profile nightmare
HostProfile have issues with raid controller, which includes those local disk in the hostprofile: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2002488
There’s also other issues with HostProfile for example:
* it doesn’t support ScratchConfig , doesn’t support Passthrough config.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2003473
* DNS config dialog has a bug where you can’t set it to DHCP correctly, my advise is to set to static and provide hostname in the answer file.
* Also in hostprofile dialog you can’t adjust ordering of the element, making vmnicX to be numbered by their ordering in the host profile. Make sure don’t get surprises.
5) Useful settings:
* Serial Logging: Finally I am able to set a serial logging on my pxe booted esxi5, add this to your HostProfile Advanced settings section
VMKernel.Boot.logPort = com2
I use dells, com2 is mapped to IPMI-over-lan which is very easy for me to see the logs. There’s other entries, make sure don’t map two things to same com port, you will get a nice and confusing
u'Handler in use'
error when trying to apply it.
* Syslog forwarding and verbosity
Syslog.global.logHost = udp://host:514 Config.HostAgent.log.level = info Vpx.Vpxa.config.log.level = info
Also, when you finish your hostprofile tweaking, try apply it on a host first, if it fails, fix the problem before rebooting other hosts, otherwise you will have a very confusing result where the host was put in maintenance mode but never being applied hostprofile. Also, try restarting the “Vmware Auto Deploy Waiter” service, it seems to get stuck when you muck with the imageprofiles.
Leave comments below and I will try to help you!