[ipxe-devel] iPXE chaining with VMware + OSChooser (WDS)

[Shyam Madhavan]

Classification: Public

Hi All

I've been using iPXE in our lab for sometime without any problems but 
there are a couple of issues that have been hanging over me that you may 
be able to help. 

1) When chainbooting VMware builds with iPXE, the http download of the WIM 
image is pretty slow - probably just a little faster than FTP.

At first I suspected it was network related but  I tried building VMs on 
the same subnet as the IIS server hosting the wimboot files and the 
performance is the same. Ive also managed to build physical servers using 
identical scripts and the WIMBoot is lightening fast.

Is there anything specific I need to do to accelerate the performance of 
HTTP download on VMs? I know its an open question but I just wanted to ask 
if anyone knew of any known\obvious  issues and\or if this could this be 
related to chainbooting from the default Vmware pxerom? This is with ESX 
4.1 but ive tried with 5 with the same results.

2) Our existing PXE infrastructure is based on Microsoft WDS services in 
legacy mode. It boots to an OSChooser menu by default from which you can 
specify which image you want to kick off.
We want to add an iPXE option within the menu options, as we have 
successfully managed to boot to pxelinux fine, but for some reason iPXE 
refuses to boot from OSChooser.
Again, just trying to find out if there are any known issues with this or 
if im missing something from our config. The sif file looks like the 
below:

[OSChooser]
Description = "iPXE 1.0.1 - WIMboot"
Help = "Tries to chain ipxe.pxe"
LaunchFile = "Setup\English\Other\1BE.x64\i386\ipxe.pxe"
Version = "1.00"
ImageType=Flat

Help appreciated with either of these issues.




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