And then it'll go ahead and deploy the image to the host, and now the image can successfully boot up as an ESXI host, so now we've taken a bare metal host. So when this image request hits the Auto Deploy server, it'll analyze it's rules engine to figure out which image profile it should give to this bare metal ESXi host. And the rules engine is the part of the Auto Deploy server that makes those decisions.
PXEBOOT VMWARE ESXI 6 MAC
So rules can be assigned to send different images to different hosts based on their MAC address, based on the vendor of the host, based on a fixed DHCP IP address, so we can set up rules to send certain images to certain hosts. And so now the ESXi host will issue that HTTP request to the Auto Deploy server, which is actually just your vCenter server, and it'll request an image, and depending on the rules engine of Auto Deploy, a certain image will be deployed to this ESXi host. And the PXE boot file is basically just enough information for this ESXi host to boot up, and to issue an HTTP request to the Auto Deploy server. And so now the ESXi host will reach out to the TFTP server, and it'll get a PXE boot file.
![pxeboot vmware esxi 6 pxeboot vmware esxi 6](https://www.bujarra.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/vsphere5pxeboot05.jpg)
So really the only configuration that we need with this bare metal host, is to configure it to do a DHCP request upon boot, and now gets an address, and the address of a TFTP server from the DHCP server. And so as the bare metal ESXi host boots up, it'll send out a DHCP request, and it'll get an IP address, and the address of a TFTP server from the DHCP server. The first component that you need to set up if you're going to be configuring Auto Deploy, is a DHCP server.
![pxeboot vmware esxi 6 pxeboot vmware esxi 6](https://www.bujarra.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/vsphere5pxeboot06.jpg)
So the purpose of Auto Deploy is to allow you to plug in a bare metal ESXi host, and have an ESXi image, and a configuration automatically installed on that EXSi host. In this video, we'll learn about how Auto Deploy can be used to automatically deploy new ESXi hosts.