This isn’t necessarily a follow-on from the other three blogs so far in this series, but more of an alternative to parts one and two. Following on from those I felt that the process could be much more automated, and less “ssh into every box and change things manually”. After all, the less changes we can make iteratively and imperatively ↗, the more it is programmed or declarative, the better....
Following on from my previous post on configuring custom ESXi images for PXE deployment, it piqued my interest again in Auto Deploy, now that I have a lab large enough (enough physical failure domains) to justify auto-deploy I figured i’d give it another go. I have chosen to implement stateless caching as it will allow the hosts to boot from the last used ESXi image they had if the PxE/AutoDeploy server goes down - then when it comes back up will pull the new version, this accounts for a total infrastructure outage and still allows the hosts to be bootable....
Introduction I have recently been working on a larger scale platform for my employer, it requires quick deployments of environments on VSAN with some standardised VIBs added in, initially we were doing this with a standard ESXi ISO install through iDRAC and then installing vCenter, vSphere Update Manager and pushing the VIBs to the hosts via that. This is clearly a sub-optimal process and given our dedicated lab environment, we wanted to be able to spin up/down environments a bit more quickly - so we looked to optimising the install process and making production ready as the first step (as most people know, VSAN has some stringent HCL requirements when it comes to drivers and firmware)....
Spent longer than necessary messing with vRealize Orchestrator and trying to get it to display the plugin in vCenter server appliance 6.0 U1, you can review my trials and tribulations here: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/523397?src=vmw_so_vex_mgray_1080 ↗ I have been trying to deploy vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.3 with my VCSA 6.0 U1 instance (supported according to compatibility matrix), the symptoms are almost exactly the same as this post: Re: Installing vRO v6.01 but not showing in web client ↗...