ESXi hosts deployed using vSphere Auto Deploy run a stateless ESXi image in the machine memory with host specific configuration applied to it. However, when you create a deploy rule, which you will learn in the next section, you have an option to associate a host profile to the hosts that will be provisioned using the deploy rule. Hence, it is important to create a host profile prior to creating a deploy rule. To learn more about creating host profiles, read the recipe Creating a Host Profile, in Chapter 3, Using vSphere Host Profiles.

In order to make sure that you do not have to jump between chapters to achieve the task, I have included a summary of the steps required to create a host profile.