Lets face it, repetition sucks. When provisioning ESX hosts, using such things as the EDA make life easier, but it only does so much for ESXi.
The install for ESXi is simple and straight forward, but when done, you have to go and set everything else (IP, hostname, DNS, local users, etc…). Doing this for 20 hosts could be a PITA (Pain In The A..), so I set out on writing a script that does all of this for you.
All you have to do is set the IP & root password, then verify you can ping the host by it’s hostname (set host/A record in DNS). Once that’s verified, here’s what the script does for you:
- Creates an Admins group and assigns it to the Administrator role
- Creates local users, sets their default password, and adds them to the Admins group
- Sets primary & secondary NTP & DNS servers
- Sets DNS search suffix
- Combines the provided hostname with DNS search suffix to populate the hostname FQDN
- Sets EnableNaviReg to 0, disabled (requested by my storage team)
- Disables iSCSI (disabled by default, but enabled in my sd image I created from previous post, thus the need to disable)
- Disabled Tech Support Mode, aka ‘unsupported’ console
This is a slightly more advanced script, and it’s not fully polished, but works. Read the rest of this entry »