Hello,
Is PXE relevant anymore with vCAC/vRA?
There is a large discussion occurring with my client that is building out a very large private vRA environment. Self-service portal, updates, ticket creating, application install.. the works. The operating systems teams are trying to leverage their own PXE (Windows has one and Linux has another) while the VMware Engineers and Corporate Architects are countering with vRA and Templates. Some of the points have been around who controlls what. Obviously the OS teams want to keep their control but a number of the goals of the vRA project cant be meet with each team running their own PXE.
From where I am sitting, I dont see the value in PXE anymore in a vRA Environment. Both teams are running custom code (no off the shelf software such as RHEL Enterprise Tools or SCCM) to do their own deploy. They also are trying to be agnostic with those environments for the cases where they have to deploy physical machines. Which happens once in a while, but still talking 1 physical for every 50 VMs. Again to me that is not a way to build a standard with 50:1 ratio. The VMware Eng team keeps running into roadblocks with dealing with the PXE that the OS Teams have built; such as updates and changes. One of the biggest is error handling in the blueprints. The automation team that is on the VM Team have zero control over notifications when errors occur outside vRA. Deploying from Templates is also faster than kickstarts and mounted ISOs so far in their environment.
Going back to my original question.. If you are building an automation hub of self-service portals, patch management, application installs and workflow management for tens of thousands of servers.. is PXE relevant?
Thanks,
Boston Tech Guy