Automating ESXi Installation

This Ansible playbook runs on CentOS. It will create a server which allows you to install ESXi automatically via PXE boot and Kickstart.

For more information on ESXi's Kickstart capabilities see this link

Prerequisites

Install CentOS

You can download and install CentOS here

The installation services used by this program are very lightweight so you can install on just about anything. A 12GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, and a single processor are enough for what we are doing.

Go ahead and install CentOS on whatever you like, the only requirement is that it must be reachable at layer 2 by the ESXi hosts you want to install.

Install Ansible and git

Before continuing you will need to install Ansible on your host by running yum install -y ansible git.

Clone the Repo

I typically use opt for optional programs. You may install wherever you like, but in this guide I will use opt. Clone the repo with: git clone https://github.com/grantcurell/esxi-autoinstall.git

Move into the esxi-autoinstall directory with cd /opt/esxi-autoinstall

Configure the Inventory File

Ansible is controlled by what is called an inventory file. This inventory file contains all the configuration settings which will be used by Ansible. In our case, we will need to populate this with the settings we wish ESXi to have after installation.

The inventory file is called inventory.yml

You will need to fill in the following values:

• dns
• dhcp_start
• dhcp_end
• gateway
• netmask
• domain
• root_password
• server_ip
• iso_esxi_pth
• iso_esxi_checksum

Finally you will also need to fill in the host information. These are the hosts on which you would like to install ESXi.

Boot Drives

Most of the values are self explanatory however, boot_drive and data_drives may be a bit confusing. These options allow you to tell Ansible where to install ESXi and on which disks to configure datastores. The official documentation on how ESXi names drives is here The disks are in the order in which ESXi detects them. To get the order you may have to manually install ESXi on a system. You can make an educated guess from the BIOS menu or if you have something like iDrac you can look at the order of the disks on the RAID controller (assuming you have one).

Running the Code

Once you are finished editing the inventory.yml file, cd to the root of the esxi-autoinstall directory and run make. This will run the makefile in the directory. You can see what it is doing by examining the file called Makefile

Advanced

You may want the installer to do some crazier things. The kickstart script used to configure the hosts can be modified to run arbitrary esxcli commands. You're on your own if you want to go this route, but you can find the kickstart file with the esxcli commands in roles/profiles/templates/ks.cfg.j2.