Mike La Spina has written a nice post about automatic installation of ESX 4.0 hosts utilizing PXE, kickstart and a lot of scripts. Mike has done a nice job creating configuration scripts, making it easy to copy his ideas for use in your own environment.

Auto installation becomes necessary if you need to deploy a large number of hosts. Now, if VMware only could copy Virtual Iron’s way of automatically installing and setting up hosts. My dream is an automatic installation and configuration of ESXi hosts without the need for painful point-and-click-customatization after the host is added to vCenter. Host profiles, as far as I know, solves only half the problem (and yeah, I know that it is possible to achieve this by using some custom scripts)…