One of the last projects I’ve been involved with at Seatrans, is to auto­mate the instal­la­tion and con­fig­u­ra­tion of vSphere ESXi 5 hosts for deploy­ment on ves­sels. I’ve talked a bit about this before, both on vSoup and in Set­ting Up Auto­mated ESXi Deploy­ments where I out­lined my PXE and Pow­er­CLI based instal­la­tion and con­fig­u­ra­tion scheme. Not much has changed since then, except updat­ing the PXE server to offer ESXi 5, instead of ESXi 4 and a lot of work has been put into the script­ing, includ­ing a front-end GUI for the Pow­er­CLI script itself. The end “prod­uct” is now in place for mass deploy­ments for inter­nal use.

The fol­low­ing video shows how the PXE based instal­la­tion works, as well as a run through the now GUI based con­fig­u­ra­tion tool aptly called Seatrans Hyper­vi­sor Instal­la­tion Tool.

The video jumps a bit between two VMs, one run­ning Win­dows Server 2008 R2, that runs the DHCP/PXE ser­vices and the Pow­er­CLI script, and one that gets ESXi installed and configured:

This goes to show that you can cre­ate your own, spe­cial­ized and portable deploy­ment solu­tion with­out requir­ing elab­o­rate net­work con­fig­u­ra­tions or recon­fig­ur­ing of exist­ing infrastructure.

Note: I will not be pro­vid­ing down­load­able ver­sions of the final script at this time. The rea­son for this is quite sim­ple, it’s very spe­cific and tai­lored for a non-generic envi­ron­ment. If I can man­age to find the time, I’ll post a generic ver­sion later but in order for any­one else to uti­lize the Pow­er­CLI scripts I’ve cre­ated, a lot of work is required.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.