It is finally released… PXE Manager for vCenter. My former Cloud colleague Max Daneri of VMTS fame has worked very very hard on this and actually demoed it at VMworld in 2009. I know Max is already working on the next release which of course will work with the upcoming vSphere version as well. So if you’ve tested it and have feedback don’t forget to leave a comment on labs.vmware.com.
PXE Manager for vCenter enables ESXi host state (firmware) management and provisioning. Specifically, it allows:
- Automated provisioning of new ESXi hosts stateless and stateful (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
HOLY COW – my boot from SAN days are FINALLY coming to an end :-). WOOOOOOOHOOOOOO!
Hey Duncan – since this was released through VMware Labs, is it currently supported by VMware or a function that will be rolled in and supported as a new function of vCenter?
Awesome news!
DP
There are no plans to support or add this to vCenter
These are great tools especially if you build a lot of esx servers at your current location. However, we typically are building esx servers for a new client thus we don’t have vcenter built as yet. I guess you could build one host, build vcenter as a VM then load this utility to load the rest of the host. We typically use the “EDA” because it does not require vcenter out of the gate. It would be great to see VMware utilize an appliance approach like the EDA or UDA?
Thanks for the info.
@ Duncan – Thanks. Now, all together with me – “Boooooooooooooo!”
🙂
DP
Hrmm.. does this only manage hosts which are added to vCenter, or can you add standalone ESXi hosts? I assume not, but any form of patch management for standalone hosts would be great since VMware decided to kill the host update utility for whatever insane reason.
No PXE Manager has been designed to deploy and manage multi ESXi distribuited on different datacenter and different vcenter
But I’m thinking to extract a part of PXE code to create a stand alone patch manager. Depend from the numbers of request 🙂
Well, you know you have my vote!
What is VMware’s stance on using VMware Lab’s tools like this?
Will VMware just not support the module specifically or will we run into trouble with support if we have issues after using things like this?