You can use Host Profiles and vSphere Auto Deploy to provision physical ESXi hosts with 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, you create and configure a reference host. Then, you create a host profile from the reference host. Next, you associate the host profile with an Auto Deploy rule. As a result new hosts that you provision with Auto Deploy have the host profile applied automatically.
Remediation for these hosts is the same as statefully deployed hosts. When you apply the host profile, you are prompted to customize the hosts and enter answers for the policies that you specified during the host profile creation.
syslog
to store logs in a remote server. For more information on setting up a syslog from the Host Profiles interface, see the
vSphere Installation and Setup documentation.
For more information on setting up an Auto Deploy reference host, see the VMware ESXi Installation and Setup documentation.