Image profiles are a set of vSphere Installation Bundles (VIBs), a collection of files packaged into a single archive to facilitate distribution and used to boot the ESXi hosts. Image profiles are built and made available in public depots by VMware and VMware partners. You can create custom image profiles, usually cloning an existing image profile and then adding required software packages VIBs to the image created.
To create an image profile, you should add at least one software depot but you can add multiple software depots. A software depot can be a structure of folders and files stored on an HTTP server (online depot) or, more commonly, in the form of a ZIP file (offline depot). The software depot contains the image profiles and software packages VIBs that are used to run ESXi.
Using the new available graphic interface introduced in vSphere 6.5, you can create image profiles in an easier way without having to battle with PowerCLI. The steps are as follows:
- Go to the Auto Deploy configuration page then select the Software Depots tab
- Click on the green arrow to import a software depot
- Type a name in the Name field and select the file to use as image then click Upload:
- Click on Image Profiles to see the available image profiles defined in this software depot:
An image profile doesn't contain any configuration (virtual switch, security settings, and so on) and you should use the vSphere Host Profile feature to store the desired ESXi configuration in vCenter Server providing the parameters to the host to provision. If syslog is not configured in the host profile, logs are lost every time the host is rebooted since they are stored in memory.