Everyone installing more than 2 or 3 ESX hosts at a time should start with scripting their installation in my opinion, why?:
- it will save time
- consistent installations
- no need anymore for doing backups of the ESX host
These three should be enough reasons to start scripting. A good place to start is this topic on the VMTN Forums and my Blog post.
One of the dangers most of you will face is the fact that the SAN is attached during installation. So what’s the danger? Well if you’re unlucky the installation will be done on a SAN LUN. This is very hard to prevent in the installation scripts. Because of that Bouke of Jume created a script which removes the HBA drivers from the setup. So if you’re doing scripted installs, and don’t want to unplug your fiber when you do an installation be sure to use this excellent script on your installation media!
Let’s hope Bouke can find some more time and keeps on blogging!
vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide
[...] with his appliance. I don’t think there’s a reason to tell you guys again why you need to do a scripted install. EDA is a PXE Boot Virtual Appliance build on JeOS. In other words, boot your ESX installer / iso [...]