Having hard times to deploy several VMware vSphere ESX Servers? after intallation customizations takes days for each new host?. Think I can help you a little bit here.

Last week have been working with ESX Deployment Appliance which is a virtual appliance that provides an easy to use application to deploy VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi servers through PXE.

This small appliance will allow us to:

• Install VMware ESX/ESXi 3.x/4.x hosts
• Define virtual network settings
• Define license server parameters
• Enable VMotion
• Configure NTP
• Add a banner
• Add local users
• Get remote files
• Define hosts file
• Enable SSH root Access
• Plus much more

Basically we need to poweron the virtual appliance, set the correct ip settings and mount an ISO file of VMware ESX/ESXi on its virtual cdrom. Then create a new profile for the ESX host with all the parameters.

Sometimes the option to press F2 to access a virtual machine BIOS on VMware ESX4 passes to fast infront of your eyes. If you need to access the BIOS and can’t press F2 fast enough there is another way to access it. Basically you need to select the virtual machine and then press the “Edit Settings” button.

Then go to the Options tab/Boot Options and select “the next time the virtual machine boots…”

Now that we have our Windows seven installed on VMware Workstation we need to install VMware tools in order to take full advantage of all the features that VMware Workstation provides.

A network administrator once told me that if your network is based on Cisco devices one thing that you should not forget to work with is CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol). A few years later I found myself working with a lot of Cisco devices and VMware ESX Servers and discovered that one of the most interesting things is the ability to understand the network topology using Cisco Discovery Protocol o CDP.

By default CDP is configured on VMware ESX Servers just for listen their neighborhoods on the network. To verify this type the following command: