[ipxe-devel] Status Update: Booting VMWare ESXi 5.1 installer via iPXE native Multiboot (+iSCSI)

[Marek Salwerowicz]

Hi all,
W dniu 2012-09-17 07:27, Thomas Glanzmann pisze:
>
>> I did come up with a workaround for a person in the IRC channel that
>> chainloads to pxelinux.0 to load the installer via it's mboot.c32 file,
>> so they could at least get ESXi installing. I can post that if there is
>> interest.
> I also installed on Saturday three ESXi 5.1 machines using this chainload:
>
> #!ipxe
> dhcp net0
> kernel -n mboot.c32 http://10.10.10.1/esxi5.1/mboot.c32
> imgargs mboot.c32 -c http://10.10.10.1/ipxe/esxi5.1.cfg
> boot mboot.c32
> [..]

Yesterday the same worked for me, but as I wanted to install the ESXi 
directly to an iSCSI target hooked to the machine, I had some problems 
probably with NICs (I read somewhere that there is the rule that with 
iSCSI targets there should be _at least_ 2 NICs - 1st for management and 
the last one (2nd, but if there are 3, it will be 3rd etc..) for iSCSI.
The problem is that with iPXE it uses the same NIC to hook the iSCSI 
target and boot the installation - as a result I was unable to boot the 
ESXi after installation finished.


My (working) solution was to modify the boot.cfg inside the ISO image:
kernelopts=ks=http://xx.xx.xx.xx/ks.cfg

and boot the installer from the ISO file, using the script:

#!ipxe
dhcp net0
set keep-san 1
sanhook --drive 0x80 iscsi:xx.xx.xx.xx::::iqn.2012-09.cluster:e1-disk
sanboot --drive 0x81 --no-describe http://xx.xx.xx.xx/my_esxi51.iso

BTW - can you provide me any links to materials how can I use the perl 
in kickstart configs? Is it possible eg. to pass the MAC address or 
hostname (from DHCP) of the ESXi host to kickstart script and generate 
it dynamically ? Thanks in advance ;)

Regards,

-- 
Marek Salwerowicz