VMware VS4-ENT-PL-A - vSphere Enterprise Plus, Setup Manual, Page: 193 / 276

Set Up Networking for Your Auto Deploy Host in the vSphere Web Client
You can set up networking for your Auto Deploy reference host and apply the host profile to all other hosts
to guarantee a fully functional networking environment.
Prerequisites
Provision the host you want to use as your reference host with an ESXi image by using Auto Deploy.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, select the host and click the Networking tab.
2 Perform networking setup.
If you are using virtual switches and not vSphere Distributed Switch, do not add other VMkernel NICs
to vSwitch0.
3 After the reference host is configured, reboot the system to verify that vmk0 is connected to the
Management Network.
4 Create a host profile from the host.
What to do next
n
Write a rule that applies the host profile to all hosts that you want to provision with the settings that
you specified in the reference host. See “Assign a Host Profile to Hosts,” on page 174.
n
For hosts already provisioned with Auto Deploy, perform the compliance testing and repair operations
to provision them with the new host profile. See “Test and Repair Rule Compliance,” on page 176.
n
Turn on unprovisioned hosts to provision them with the new host profile.
Consider and Implement Your Partitioning Stategy
By default, Auto Deploy provisions hosts only if a partition is available on the host. You can set up a
reference host to auto-partition all hosts that you provision with Auto Deploy.
C
AUTION
If you change the default auto-partitioning behavior, Auto Deploy overwrites existing partitions
regardless of their content. If you turn on this option, ensure that no unintended data loss results.
To ensure that local SSDs remain unpartitioned during auto-partitioning, you must set the parameter
skipPartitioningSsds=TRUE
on the reference host.
For more information about preventing SSD formatting during auto-partitioning, see the vSphere Storage
documentation.
Prerequisites
n
Provision the host you wish to use as your reference host with an ESXi image by using Auto Deploy.
n
Verify that you have access to a vSphere Web Client that can connect to the vCenter Server system.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, select the host you want to use as a reference host and click Manage.
2 Click Settings.
3 Click System to open the system options and click Advanced System Settings.
4 Scroll to VMkernel.Boot.autoPartition and set the value to true.
5 (Optional) If you want local SSDs to remain unpartitioned, scroll to
VMkernel.Boot.skipPartitioningSsds
and set the value to true.
6 If no host profile exists for your reference host, create it now.
Chapter 7 Installing ESXi
VMware, Inc. 193