In many production situations, a highly available vSphere Auto Deploy infrastructure is required to prevent data loss. Such infrastructure is also a prerequisite for using vSphere Auto Deploy with stateless caching.

Figure 1. Highly Available vSphere Auto Deploy Infrastructure

A management cluster that is protected by vSphere HA and vSphere DRS makes the Auto Deploy infrastructure highly available.

Prerequisites

For the management cluster, install ESXi on three hosts. Do not provision the management cluster hosts with vSphere Auto Deploy.

Procedure

  1. Enable vSphere HA and vSphere DRS on the management cluster.
  2. Set up the following virtual machines on the management cluster.
    Infrastructure Component Description
    PXE boot infrastructure TFTP and DHCP servers.
    Infrastructure VM Active Directory, DNS, vCenter Server.
    vSphere Auto Deploy environment PowerCLI, vSphere Auto Deploy server, vCenter Server. Set up this environment on a single virtual machine or on three separate virtual machines in production systems.
    The vCenter Server on the infrastructure virtual machine differs from the vCenter Server in the vSphere Auto Deploy environment.
  3. Set up vSphere Auto Deploy to provision other hosts as needed.
    Because the components on the management cluster are protected with vSphere HA, high availability is supported.