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

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.

This guide will show you the necesary steps to performa a basic installation of VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 4. As the previous line says this is a basic "How to" and will not show you complex configurations of the server. Those configurations will be shown on a future post.
 
In order to install VMware ESX Server 2.5 Update 4 on our server we need to make it to boot from the installation CD. Once booted this will be the first screen you'll see.