After creating a rule and adding it to the active rule set, you can provision the first host and check its vCenter Server location to complete verification of the image provisioning of your setup.

Procedure

  1. Open a console session to the physical host that you want to use as the first ESXi target host, boot the host, and look for messages that indicate a successful iPXE boot.
    During the boot process, DHCP assigns an IP address to the host. The IP address matches the name you specified earlier in the DNS server. The host contacts the vSphere Auto Deploy server and downloads the ESXi binaries from the HTTP URL indicated in the iPXE tramp file that you downloaded earlier to the TFTP_Root directory. Each instance of vSphere Auto Deploy produces a custom set of files for the TFTP Server.
  2. Use the vSphere Web Client to connect to the vCenter Server system that manages the vSphere Auto Deploy server.
  3. On the vSphere Web Client Home page, click Hosts and Clusters.
  4. Verify that the newly provisioned host is now in the vCenter Server inventory at the datacenter level.
    By default, vSphere Auto Deploy adds hosts at the datacenter level when the boot process completes.

What to do next

Extract a host profile from the host and configure it to require user input.