Okay a new update. I have no idea if you're following these updates or not anymore, since you've not responded to any posts in this thread in a while. But here goes...
Started working on a new ESXi 5.1 image (build 799733) with the intent of including HP's October release set for drivers/utilities. When I checked for components that are *not* stateless ready (i.e. Auto Deploy friendly) a few came up:
PS> Get-EsxSoftwarePackage | ? { $_.StatelessReady -eq $False } | ft -AutoSize
char-hpilo is the interface driver for the iLO, and is paired with hponcfg which is used to get/set iLO configuration from within ESXi. In our case, we do not manage iLO configurations within ESXi anyhow, so I decided to exclude char-hpilo and hponcfg. And of course, excluded hp-ams since it's for Gen8 hardware only. So for HP utilities I'm only bundling char-hpcru, hpacucli, hpbootcfg, hp-nmi, and hp-smx-provider.
But we do need nx-nic driver for some of our rack-mount hosts that will ultimatley also run ESXi 5.1. And in this case, the version that is not marked as Stateless Ready came from HP's October driver set. VMware's driver in the ESXi 5.1 base image is marked Stateless Ready.
This brought me back to thinking about the blog article added to one of my earlier posts in this thread about using HP selected drivers vs. VMware certified drivers. And when I looked at firmware changes up to SPP 2012.10, only firmware I found myself concerned about is for the NC553i FlexFabric adapters, which HP's October guide recommends using version 4.1.450.16, which is higher than what's in the 2012.10 release set anyhow. So ultimately I've decided it best to take the VMware recommended drivers and exclude any of HP's picks until I find a very specific reason/issue to do so.
As part of building this new image, I also added in vmware-fdm into the build and deployed. So far so good via Auto Deploy. I do still see a small lag at "vmware-fdm start..." as part of applying the host profile, but that may be because these test hosts are not yet members of an HA cluster?
Not sure how long of a delay you're observing, I would really appreciate hearing back from you on whether you tried adding this bundle into your build and how it impacted your boot performance. Also wondering if you're still having trouble managing your server via the iLO.