And if you ask me, it’s not just a ‘fling’, but it is really, really useful. It’s easy to install and easy to use.
PXE Manager for vCenter enables ESXi host state (firmware) management and provisioning.
PXE Manager features:
- Automated provisioning of new ESXi hosts stateless and statefull (no ESX);
- ESXi host state (firmware) backup, restore, and archiving with retention;
- ESXi builds repository management (stateless and statefull);
- ESXi Patch management;
- Multi-vCenter support;
- Multi-network support with agents (Linux CentOS virtual appliance will be available later);
- Wake on LAN;
- Hosts memtest;
- vCenter plugin;
- Deploy directly to VMware Cloud Director;
- Deploy to Cisco UCS blades.
I was amazed by the ease of the whole process. The setup took care of all the items that needed to be installed. After creating a build in the repository and creating a host under Stateless Hosts I deployed my first ESX host from PXE Manager.
Visit http://labs.vmware.com/flings/pxe-manager for the download, installation instructions and a demo on installing a stateless ESXi server.