PXE Manager Part V – Add a Stateful ESXi Host

Follow the following instructions to add a stateful ESXi host to PXE Manager.

Prerequisites:

Follow the following instruction to add a stateful ESXi host to PXE Manager.

1. Open the vSphere Client, Home, PXE Manager to open PXE Manager

   

2. Click to activate the “Stateful Hosts” tab, right click and select “Add Host”

   

3. Click to select the “I agree …” radio button and click “Next”

   

4. Enter the name of the ESXi host you wsih to deploy, enter and confirm the root password for this ESXi host and click “Next”

   

5. Select the build you wish to install for this ESXi host and click “Next”

   

6. Select the appropriate PXE agent to deploy the ESXi host and click “Next”. (make sure you select the PXE agent located in the same datacenter as where the ESXi host is located).

   

7. Enter the MAC addresses, IP, Subnet Mask, Gateway, Pri. DNS, Sec. DNS and the correct VLAN in case you NIC’s are connected to trunk ports for the ESXi host and click “Next”

   

8. Select the correct cluster and click “Next”

   

9. Select a Licence for the ESXi host and click “Next”

   

10. In case you wish to apply a host profile, select the host profile or leave defaults and click “Next”

    

11. If desired enable locked down mode and click “Next”

    

12. Enter the NTP servers and syslog server and click “Next”

    

13. For boot from SAN, select “Local, Remote” from the dropdown box, click to select the “Overwrite an existing VMFS …..” checkbox and click “Next”

    

14. Enter any post actions and click “Finish”. (As host profiles do not rename the local datastore, I entered here a command that renames the local datastore). Any of these commands will get executed on the firstboot.

    

15. Select the newly added host and click the “Wake on Lan” hyperlink to boot up the server and start the installation.