Remote booting in Vmware and Xen

April 1, 2007 @ 5:55 pm · Filed under Tech, Vmware, Xen

This has been sitting my drafts for a while. Might be useful.

I’ve collected a few interesting pages in providing remote booting with Vmware and Xen guests.

Using AoE and Etherboot. This is still work in progress.

http://www.coraid.com/support/linux/contrib/vantuyl/aoeboot.html

HOWTO: AOE in domU and boot from it. http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2006-07/msg00595.html

My target environment is XEN, and the relevent parameters to be changed are:

ramdisk = "/boot/img.aoe"
root = "/dev/etherd/e9.0 ro"

(or whatever your aoe target happens to be… I think that was the vblade
default example).

http://www.emboot.com/products_winboot_i_FAQ.htm#q6

Can I PXE boot to an iSCSI target from within a virtual machine from VMware or Microsoft?

Yes, you can use winBoot/i to network boot VMware and Microsoft virtual machines from an iSCSI target. HBA-equipped systems hosting virtual machines generally do not allow sharing (or virtualization) of the HBA-capability within the vm environment. We recommend using our Managed Boot Agent on Disk (MBAoD) for VMs to PXE-enable the virtual NIC within the virtual machine.

http://www.emboot.com/VMware_howto.html

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