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Automating ESXi 5 Kickstart Tips & Tricks

07.13.2011 by William Lam // 58 Comments

There are some minor changes with kickstarting ESXi 5.0 but the majority of your existing ESXi 4.1 kickstart configurations can be re-used with a few modifications. One of my goals during the vSphere 5.0 beta was to automate as much of the configurations of an ESXi host as possible within the kickstart process. I also converted as many of the legacy esxcfg-* commands as I could over to the enhanced esxcli namespaces as the esxcfg-* commands will eventually be deprecated in favor of esxcli. Hopefully the tips & tricks and the example kickstart configuration file will be useful in aiding the transition to ESXi 5.0.

As usual, before diving in and creating an ESXi 5.0 kickstart configuration, make sure you spend some time going over the documentation provided by VMware, specifically the ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide. If you would like to get a sense for what a ESXi 5.0 kickstart could look like, please jump to the bottom of this post to get a complete working example displaying the various types of configurations.

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Categories // Uncategorized Tags // ESXi 5.0, kickstart, ks.cfg, vSphere 5.0

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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