Deploying VMware ESXi

Once you've established the basics of your vSphere design and you've settled on ESXi (as opposed to ESXi Embedded, which I'll discuss later in the section “Deploying VMware ESXi Embedded”), you have to decide exactly how you are going to deploy ESXi.

There are three primary ways to deploy ESXi:

• Interactive installation of ESXi
• Unattended (scripted) installation of ESXi
• Stateless provisioning of ESXi

Of these, the simplest is an interactive installation of ESXi. The most complex—but perhaps the most powerful, depending on your needs and your environment—is stateless provisioning of ESXi. In this section, I'll describe all three of these methods for deploying ESXi in your environment.

Let's start with the simplest method first: interactively installing ESXi.