If you are looking at provisioning 100s of ESXi hosts in your datacenter and don't know how to rapidly provision those, then Auto Deploy is your answer. With Auto Deploy, you can specify the image that will be used to provision the ESXi hosts. Also, you can specify/configure host profiles that will help you get those hosts configured if you need them to be identical and add them to a vCenter .
Auto Deploy uses a PXE boot infrastructure in conjunction with vSphere host profiles to provision and customize that host. An ESXi host does not store any state information; Auto Deploy manages that state information. Auto Deploy stores this state information of each ESXi host in different locations. When a host boots for the first time, the vCenter server system creates a corresponding host object and stores the information in the database. However, since ESXi 5.1, VMware introduced two different features along with stateless ESXi; they are called stateless...