To take advantage of this deployment method, it is essential to understand how Auto Deploy works and what steps and services are involved during the ESXi deployment process. Different components interact with vSphere Auto Deploy when a fresh host boots:

The ESXi booting process through the Auto Deploy feature involves the following steps:

1. When the server first boots, the host starts a PXE boot sequence. The DHCP server provides an IP address giving instructions to the host on how to contact the TFTP server (DHCP configuration will be discussed later).
2. When the host establishes the connection with the TFTP server, it downloads the iPXE file (executable boot loader), named undionly.kpxe.vmw-hardwired for legacy BIOS or snponly64.efi.vmw-hardwired for UEFI BIOS, and a configuration file.
3. During the iPXE execution, the host makes an HTTP boot request to the vSphere Auto Deploy server (this info is stored in the iPXE configuration file) to get hardware and network information.
4. The vSphere Auto Deploy server streams the required components as the image profile to the hosts based on the defined rules.
5. Host boots using the image profile assigned by the deploy rule. If a host profile has been assigned as well, it is applied to the host.
6. The host is added to the same vCenter with which Auto Deploy is registered. If any rule does not specify the inventory location, the host is added to the first data center displayed in the vSphere Web Client UI.