Host Profiles works with vSphere Auto Deploy to provision physical ESXi hosts have a complete and expected configuration state for virtual switches, driver settings, boot parameters, and so on.
Because hosts that are provisioned with Auto Deploy are considered to be stateless, configuration state information is not stored on the host. Instead, create a reference host and configure it completely with the settings you want. Then, create a Host Profile from this reference host. Next, associate the Host Profile with a new deploy rule using the Auto Deploy rules engine through the PowerCLI. Now, as new hosts are provisioned through Auto Deploy, they will automatically have the Host Profile applied
Remediation for these hosts is the same as statefully deployed hosts. The user is prompted to customize the hosts and enter answers for policies that are specified during Host Profile creation when the Host Profile is applied.
If you deploy ESXi through Auto Deploy, configure syslog to store logs on a remote server. See the instructions to set up Syslog from the Host Profiles interface in the vSphere Installation and Setup documentation.
For more information, see about setting up an Auto Deploy reference host in the vSphere Auto Deploy documentation.
