If you haven’t heard or read some of the new capabilities in vSphere 5 around rapid provisioning hosts, allow me to introduce you to Auto Deploy (previously Fling).  Auto Deploy is a PXE boot process that loads ESXi into memory thereby eliminating any need for local storage, even USB boot thumb drives. This capability is currently limited in that you may only have one Auto Deploy server per vCenter instance. This pretty much rules out the notion of load balancing the TFTP service, providing multiple image distribution points, or otherwise protecting Auto Deploy with methods other than VMware HA. However, [...]