Appreciate the response.  Yeah Im in the same boat.  May be time to say goodbye to AutoDeploy.  Then again, with 8U1's host profile changes to json & clusters switching to desired state config, it may actually be more stable.  Will be interested to see when it gets released.

As far as the HTTP UEFI--  I think Im good now.  I battled with our Bluecat DHCP for a while until I realized I didnt even need to bother as our HPE gear could do it natively w/o any DHCP customization by simply adding the mboot.efi url as an HTTP Boot Option in the profile.  Works like a charm.

How (if you know) are folks getting kickstart customizations done if they have secureboot enabled?  Looks like nothing in %firstboot will run with secureboot.

Thanks again,