Follow best practices when installing vSphere Auto Deploy and when using vSphere Auto Deploy with other vSphere components. Set up a highly available vSphere Auto Deploy infrastructure in large production environments or when using stateless caching. Follow all security guidelines that you would follow in a PXE boot environment, and consider the recommendations in this chapter.
vSphere Auto Deploy Best Practices You can follow several vSphere Auto Deploy best practices, set up networking, configure vSphere HA, and otherwise optimize your environment for vSphere Auto Deploy.
Set Up Highly Available vSphere Auto Deploy Infrastructure 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.
vSphere Auto Deploy Security Considerations When you use vSphere Auto Deploy, pay careful attention to networking security, boot image security, and potential password exposure through host profiles to protect your environment.
Using the Device Alias Configuration Host Profile In vSphere, you can persistently map a device (bus address) to a device name (alias). You can modify the mapping by using the Device Alias Configuration host profile. Using persistent mapping can help avoid compliance warnings for stateless hosts, and is also useful for stateful hosts.
Provision ESXi Host by Using an Image Profile Without VMware Tools When you provision v hosts with vSphere Auto Deploy, you can select to provision the hosts with an image profile that does not contain VMware Tools binaries. This image profile is smaller, has a lower memory overhead, and boots faster in a PXE-boot environment.
Download vSphere Auto Deploy Logs You can use the vSphere Auto Deploy logging information from the vSphere Web Client to resolve problems that you encounter with vSphere Auto Deploy.