Just Another IT Blog

It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

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Eventually you reach a point when you want/need your ESX installations to be consistent across your environment.
That’s when scripted installations get on board.

It would help you saving some man hour costs solving software conflicts and installation issues just creating a more in-depth automation process for repeatability and predictability installation results

But how to get started ?

If you search the web, you will find several posts and lot of fancy scripts, but you are just a rookie on this new world and probably these result will just confuse you even more.

You probably can start with ESX Installation Guide, there’s a section just for scripted installation. But you will realize there are some pitfalls you would need to overcome.

So in this series of 4 posts I will show you how I conquered this task and how can you too.

The easiest way to start is doing a normal ESX installation through the ESX Graphical mode.
That’s your best opportunity to set up your disk layout , root password , time zone, etc…




Once your installation is done, there’ll be a file called ks.cfg at the root folder of your system,
This file will be the bases of your scripted installation. Copy it to a place where you can store and make changes. (do not use Windows text editor to make changes on it)

When editing ks.cfg then you will see all the choices you did during the installation:
As root password (remember it will be encrypted on the file).

Also you can see all the sections and compare with the ESX Installation Guide to understand what they do and how to use them.

During the next post we will cover more about customizing it.

On this journey together you will see that we can start simple and make just the changes we want for our environment

ESX Scripted Install – part 2/4 coming soon on a laptop near you ; )

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