Provisioning target servers with ESXi 4.0

The TrueSight Server Automation installation provides an ESXi 4.0 boot image that you can use to perform a stateless (scriptless) installation of ESXi 4.0 on 64-bit devices.

The TrueSight Server Automation installation provides an ESXi 4.0 boot image.

• You can use the ESXi 4.0 boot image to provision 64-bit devices only.
• You cannot configure this image as the default image for your environment. However, you can configure the custom ESXi boot image to support 32-bit devices and you can set that image as the default image. For information, see Configuring-boot-image-files.
• You cannot use the ESXi 4.0 boot image with a system package in a Provision Job.
• The ESXi 4.0 boot image does not support auto-discovery of devices.

To perform a stateless installation of ESXi 4.0

1. Download and extract the ESXi 4.0 image to the TFTP server at this location: tftproot/X86PC/prelinux.
    For information about extracting the image, see PXE booting VMware ESXi on the VMWare website.
2. Edit the values for the ESXi 4.0 image file (vmkboot.gz) provided in the TrueSight Server Automation installation:
   1. In the TrueSight Server Automation Console, select Configuration > Provisioning Configuration. Then click the Image Files tab.
   2. Select the ESXi 4.0 image type and click Edit .
   3. Edit the values for Image File and Kernel name to specify paths that are relative to the TFTP server.
   4. For modules in the Kernel commandline, specify paths that are relative to the TFTP server.
   5. Click OK.
3. Associate the ESXi 4.0 boot image with a target device by manually importing the device. See Manually-adding-one-device.

4. Reboot the target device. It boots from the ESXi 4.0 image.
   When the device boots from the PXE server, the ESXi 4.0 kernel is loaded, followed by the modules specified in the kernel command line.

   Note

   The ESXi 4.0 boot image contains several large modules, which can cause timeout failures during the transfer of the image from the TFTP server. If this problem occurs, you can edit the tftp.conf file and increase the value for retries. (The retries entry specifies the number of times that the TFTP server tries to send a file to the target server.) The setting should be large enough to allow the transfer of large modules but the setting is network specific. For example, you might try retries=30.
   The tftp.conf file resides in the following locations:

   • Windows: installationDirectory\PXE\br\tftp.conf
   • UNIX: installationDirectory/NSH/br/tftp.conf