Posting this to ESXi 4 specific forum, given the nature of the question. Ok, here is the problem, we have HP, Dell, IBM, etc. hardware. Each vendor has their own respective ESXi images or at a minimum methods to 'inject' code into the ESXi baseline image. So the net result is there are multiple images, each vendor has their own. The question is, in a stateless model, how do you determine which image to download via PXE? The only way I can think to do this, is to establish the different variants of the ESXi 4 stateless image for each hardware vendor, ok not so difficult. Thus the command-line parameters for the boot kernel can be hardware specific. However, this is a static assignment, not automated hardware selection process. Somewhere some how, the hardware vendor has to be known. Ok, in a database, or such, which is cross linked to the MAC address, that can work, I think, although I have worked out all the issues. Moreover, of course if a node/hardware is swapped, and the vendor changes, then the database/MAC address information has to be updated. This is not very elegant, and feels like a cludge. So has anyone else tackled this issue?
