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.
Prerequisites
For the management cluster, install ESXi on three hosts. Do not provision the management cluster hosts with vSphere Auto Deploy.
Watch the video "Highly Available vSphere Auto Deploy Infrastructure" for information about the implementation of a highly available vSphere Auto Deploy infrastructure:
Procedure
Enable vSphere HA and vSphere DRS on the management cluster.
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.
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.