[ipxe-devel] [gPXE] booting xen domU diskless Ubuntu over iSCSI

[Andrew Bobulsky]

Hello Alan,

Just wanted to write in after seeing your troubles with finding a
proper RPM on the Xen-Users list (
http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-users/2012-04/msg00439.html ).
For what it's worth, you may very well be able to chainload iPXE
successfully (where the gPXE chainload seems to have failed),  or boot
your VM from the iPXE ISO distribution, to test your
setup/installation before going down the path of upgrading Xen.  I
only suggest this because I, too, have found that to be a nontrivial
process :P

Cheers,
Andrew Bobulsky

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay+gpxe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Andrew Bobulsky <rulerof at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> No surprise that you've ended up here.  I was cursorily following your
>> posts on the Xen-Users mailing list, curious to see the solution to
>> your problem, but didn't read enough until now to see what you were
>> actually trying to do.
>
>
> Well it is supposed to work but is not working so now on to Plan B :-)
>
>>
>>  I believe that what you're after is for your
>> DomU to have direct access to your iSCSI target; in other words,
>> you're trying to get the raw iSCSI device to be used directly by your
>> VM, without layering an image file or LVM or some other sort of
>> storage abstraction inbetween the two.
>
>
> Yes, that is my Plan B that I just started today
>>
>>
>> My suspicion is that your observation about connecting the Dom0
>> initiator to your target, and then passing the device (/dev/sdX)
>> directly to the VM won't work if you want to boot the DomU from that
>> device... at least not for an HVM domain.  For what it's worth, it
>> doesn't work on VMware either.
>
>
> Hmmm, that's interesting.  It is currently working fine on VirtualBox except
> that VBox seems to crash a lot, which is why I am moving away from it
>
>>
>>
>> For the good news, what [I think] you're trying to do is built right
>> into Xen.  Part of the Xen build process compiles iPXE...
>
>
> I dunno - I'm using whatever is in RHEL 5.8 which is pretty old.  I am at
> home now so can't look it up but it is 3.0.something I think.  I may try to
> upgrade to 4.x and see if that fixes things.
>
> I'll check through this all again tomorrow at work and let you know how it
> goes.
>
> thanks,
> -Alan
>