In a large environment, deploying and upgrading ESXi hosts is an activity that requires a lot of planning and manual work. For instance, if you were to deploy a set of 50 ESXi hosts in an environment, then you might need more than one engineer assigned to perform this task. The same would be the case if you were to upgrade or patch ESXi hosts. The upgrade or the patching operation should be done on each host. Of course, you have vSphere update manager that can be configured to schedule, stage, and remediate hosts, but again the process of remediation would consume considerable amount of time, depending on the type and size of the patch. VMware have found a way to reduce the amount of manual work and time required for deploying, patching, and upgrading ESXi hosts. They call it vSphere Auto Deploy. In this chapter, you will learn not only to design, install, and configure the vSphere Auto Deploy solution, but also to provision ESXi hosts using it.