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

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…”

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: