DHCP ServiceĬlick Start, Windows Administrative Tools, DHCP, right click IPv4 and select New Scope. Now that we have DHCP and WDS installed, it’s time to configure both of them. Lets go ahead and reboot the server at this point. Once complete, click on the orange triangle and select Complete DHCP Configuration:Ĭlick Commit and Close to complete the DHCP server post install configuration. Click Add Features when prompted to add role features:Ĭlick Next four times, ensure both Deployment Server and Transport Server are selected, click Next again and finally click Install. From there click Next two or three times (depending on your server configuration and tick the following roles to be installed.

Once you Windows server has been installed, open Server Manager and select Add Roles and Features. For example, I gave my WDS server an IP address of 192.168.123.2. Once installed, make a note of the IP address you assign to the WDS server. I’m not going to cover deploying Windows Server, it’s simple enough and there are plenty of other sites that cover that ( for example). If you don’t already have a copy, you can download a 180 day trial from here. Install WDS and DHCP Servicesįirst off, grab a copy of Windows Server 2019. What’s more, using VMware Workstation / VMware Workstation Player, you could install your WDS server into a VM and use that VM to boot and deploy ESXi. Imagine having to deploy thirty two ESXi hosts from a handful of boot CD’s or USB sticks… Clustered ESXi deployments can number from two to thirty two ESXi hosts per cluster, per solution. Typically and to get the most of of the VMware portfolio of products, ESXi is not installed on just one server per datacentre or solution. Instead of all that, how about just extracting the ESXi ISO file to a folder, updating two files and booting the server to have ESXi installed over the network? Much quicker and simpler! When? To install ESXi, the administrator either has to create a USB device (stick, hard disk, etc) from the image or burn the image onto a CD-ROM or finally use some other third party method (HP iLO, Dell iDRAC, IBM RSA) to boot the ESXi installer in order to install ESXi.

Learn more about ESXi hereĮSXi is shipped by VMware in the form of an ISO disk image file.

ESXi: A bare-metal hypervisor that is capable of running Virtual Machines.WDS: Windows Deployment Services is a server technology from Microsoft for network-based installation of Windows operating systems - although we are going to leverage our WDS server for ESXi.UEFI: Unified Extensible Firmware Interface: Replaces the legacy Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface originally present in all IBM PC-compatible PCs/Servers.

Vmware esxi 6.7 booting to pxe