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2 Start the vSphere Auto Deploy service.
a Navigate to Home > Auto Deploy.
b On the Auto Deploy page, select your vCenter Server from the drop-down menu at the
top.
c Click Enable Auto Deploy and Image Builder to activate the service.
If the Image Builder service is already active, select the Configure tab and click Enable
Auto Deploy Service.
3 In the Auto Deploy inventory, click the Configure tab.
4 Click the Download TFTP Zip File.
5 Save the file deploy-tftp.zip to the TFTP_Root directory that you created when you
installed the TFTP Server, and unzip the file.
What to do next
Add a software depot to your inventory and use an image profile from the depot to create a rule
for host provisioning.
Prepare the ESXi Software Depot and Write a Rule
After you configure the vSphere Auto Deploy infrastructure, you must add an ESXi software
depot, specify an image profile, write a rule, and add it to the active rule set.
vSphere Auto Deploy provisions hosts with image profiles that define the set of VIBs that an ESXi
installation process uses. Image profiles are stored in software depots. You must make sure that
the correct image profile is available before you start provisioning hosts. When you add a software
depot to a PowerCLI session, it is available only during the current session. It does not persist
across sessions.
The steps in this task instruct you to run PowerCLI cmdlets. For additional information about the
vSphere Auto Deploy cmdlets that you can run in a PowerCLI session, see vSphere Auto Deploy
PowerCLI Cmdlet Overview.
Prerequisites
Verify that you can access the ESXi hosts that you want to provision from the system on which you
run PowerCLI.
Procedure
1 Log in as an administrator to the console of the Windows system, either directly or by using
RDP.
This task assumes that you installed PowerCLI on the system on which the vCenter Server
system is running.
VMware ESXi Installation and Setup
VMware, Inc. 201