Last week I told you about the features of the ESX Deployment appliance today I’m going to show you how to setup the appliance in oder to start installing your VMware vSphere servers automatically.

Basically the steps I’m going to describe are:

• Configure ip settings of the appliance
• Configure DHCP
• Mount the OS image
• Import PXE files

After you have finished the download of the appliance from the download site of the EDA and imported it to an existing VMware ESX Server or VMware Workstation we must first power up the appliance.

Then we must scroll down and enter in Reconfigure

Enter the appropiate IP settings and then ok when done

Open up a web browser and type the ip address you just configured on your EDA. It will prompt you for the username and password

Once you have loged in click on Configure DHCP Server and set the appropiate ip settings for the service, save the configuration and restart the service (you’ll see a message about a cd not mounted – don’t worry about it right now)

Then configure the virtual machine CD to use an ISO image (or a CD) of the ESX Server. After that the message about the cd not mounted disappears and EDA identifies the cd mounted.

Click on import PXE bootfiles

Click on home to go back to the home page

Now we are ready to create new hosts profiles but we’ll let it for another post.