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Using vSphere Auto Deploy to Netboot ESXi onto Apple Mac Hardware

01.17.2017 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Last week I published an article that demonstrated for the first time on how to netboot an ESXi installation onto Apple Mac Hardware. As you can imagine, this was very exciting news for our VMware/Apple customers, who historically have not had this capability before. Customers can now automate and install ESXi over the network onto their Apple Mac Hardware just like you would for other non-Apple hardware.

With the ability to boot ESXi over the network for Apple Mac Hardware, it is now also possible for customers to take advantage of the vSphere Auto Deploy feature. Auto Deploy allows customers to easily and quickly provision ESXi hosts at scale and integrates directly with vCenter Server to automatically join and apply specific defined host configuration policies. This is a great time to check out Auto Deploy, especially with all the new enhancements that were introduced in vSphere 6.5 like custom script bundles for example.

Below are the instructions on how to setup Auto Deploy to work with Apple Mac Hardware.

[Read more...]

Categories // Apple, Automation, ESXi, vSphere 6.0, vSphere 6.5 Tags // apple, auto deploy, BSDP, ESXi 6.0, ESXi 6.5, iPXE, mac mini, mac pro, snponly64.efi.vmw-hardwired, tftp, tramp

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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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