Deploying Automted Kickstart Scripts Over HTTP

Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

Originally I was going to cover all the various options for initiating your automated kickstart installation as “Automated Deployment of ESX Hosts Part IV”, but I have since decided to cover each method individually as there is a lot to cover and it makes more sense to break them out.

In this post I am going to cover deploying your servers over the network utilizing HTTP. To begin you will need a few things in place for this to work.  Below is a list of what you will need:

• Web Server to hosts the kickstart files and optionally your ESX installation.
• ESX Installation media or ISO’s for all versions of ESX you plan to deploy
• Your kickstart script

The first thing we need to do is setup our web server so we can host our kickstart files and optionally our installation files.  You can utilize apache, IIS, or whatever your favorite web server is for hosting HTTP.  You will need to configure a folder under your web server root for the files to be stored.  Below is my recommended structure.

-webroot
—deployment
——ESX35U1
——ESX35U2
——ESX35U3
——ESX35U4
——kickstart

Once the folder structure is created we need to copy the contents of the installation media to the respective folder. To do this you will literally copy everything on the CD and place it in the folder. Then next you will need to copy your kickstart.cfg files to the kickstart folder.

Once you have all the files uploaded to the web server it is a good idea to use your web browser to test that you are able to access them.

As part of our kickstart we define where we are going to be installing from with the following line replacing server_IP with your server IP address and ESX25U4 with the version you would like to install.

url –url http://server_IP/deployment/ESX35U4

If you wanted to pull just your kickstart.cfg files form the http server but install from the local CD media you would replace the above string with “cdrom” to let the kickstart know to look to the cdrom drive for the installation media.

Now that we have our web server up, our installation copied to our webserver, and our kickstart.cfg files on the server we can kick off our kickstart installation.

To do this we need to boot the server from the installation CD. You can boot from the CD in the cdrom drive or remote mounted over a lights out port like iLo, DRAC, or RSA. If you are going to remote mount the CD over a lights out connection you can use a much smaller portion of the ESX CD.

On your ESX installation media there is an iso file named boot.iso located under the “images” folder on the CD. You can extract that ISO image which is roughly 4mb and remote mount that to your server for the boot process if you intend to install over HTTP.

OK so now we boot off of our media either the full ESX CD or the boot.iso image and when the ESX installation screen appears we need to tell the installation where to find the kickstart file. There are a couple of options for this which are below:

If you are using dhcp then your installation string will look similar to the below string:

esx append ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0 network ks=http://server_name/deployment/kickstart/kickstart.cfg

If you are not using dhcp it would like similar to the follow string:

esx append ip=192.168.1.2 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.1 ksdevice=eth0 network ks=http://Server_IP/deployment/kickstart/kickstart.cfg

The statement ksdevice=eth0 tells anaconda (the installer) to use the eth0 interface for the install. I recommend always using eth0 for your installs. ESX will by default make the install interface the Service Console interface. So it will become the interface that is assigned to vSwitch0.

If you are using a seperate kickstart file for each server then you can call each one by name. If you are using a script like the one I discuss here then you will only need to have one kickstart file.