Blog by PQR

The EDA is typically used in enterprise environments where it not only deploys new ESX hosts but also redeploys them in case of an error.

Networks in enterprise environments are almost always using VLANs.

• make sure the ESX ip addresses are in the SAME ip range as the EDA. very important, it will not work if they're on different subnets.
• only if you can enter a VLAN tag in your BIOS for pxe (like some dell machines can), can you use EDA on a tagged network. in all other cases, you HAVE to use native vlan tagging for pxe boot. that means that when EDA runs on a ESX server, you create a portgroup with no vlan tags and have the physical switches add the tag (called native in Cisco language). the service console portgroup can not be tagged either. if you absolutely cannot have an EDA in your service console network you need to add a second console vswif and remove the first, all from the script. this is possible because once the script starts, the ESX server is running and can be on another subnet than the EDA. we leave the EDA at our customers as a disaster recovery system (or even a quick upgrade system;)* upgrading to U4 by reinstalling it with EDA is much faster than a remediate :)) and it's usually considered part of the management network wether it runs DHCP or not..
• when installing an ESX server, the network gets initiated 3 times before the first reboot. unfortunately the NIC detection routines differ slightly which causes the network order to change. so when pxe starts, your first onboard nic could be considered eth0 while the second step sees it as eth1. in the EDA there's an option to specifically set the ksdevice. you could try changing that from eth0 to eth1 or higher and see if that helps
• as for WDS, that's a very strange toolset from microsoft. even if the DHCP server points to something else, the WDS server still reponds to pxe and tftp queries. very annoying tool. i need to disable it most of the time before i can install my servers. even if i add the mac addresses of the hosts i'm installing as reservations in the dhcp scope, WDS keeps coming through.