VMware has released a technical preview of PXE manager for vCenter, which is available from the flings section from the VMware Labs website . PXE Manager is a management tool, supporting automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems. It also provides ESXi state mangement and patch management.
PXE Manager for vCenter provides the following functionalities:
- Automated provisioning of new ESXi hosts stateless and statefull (no ESX)
- ESXi host state (firmware) backup, restore, and archiving with retention
- ESXi builds repository management (stateless and statefull)
- ESXi Patch management
- Multi vCenter support
- Multi network support with agents (Linux CentOS virtual appliance will be available later)
- Wake on Lan
- Hosts memtest
- vCenter plugin
- Deploy directly to VMware Cloud Director
- Deploy to Cisco UCS blades
