[ipxe-devel] Booting the ESXi installer with iPXE

[Jarrod Johnson]

Well, I always do ipxe, then pxelinux, then vmware loader when not uefi
booting.
Since pxelinux.0 comes down using http as does it's config and that config
is loaded straight, I'm not too bothered...

 cat /tftpboot/xcat/xnba/nodes/n4
#!gpxe
#netboot esxi5.1-x86_64-hypervisor
 set 209:string xcat/xnba/nodes/n4.pxelinux
 set 210:string http://${next-server}/tftpboot/
 imgfetch -n pxelinux.0 http://${next-server}/tftpboot/xcat/pxelinux.0
 imgload pxelinux.0
 imgexec pxelinux.0

# cat /tftpboot/xcat/xnba/nodes/n4.pxelinux
DEFAULT xCAT
LABEL xCAT
 KERNEL xcat/netboot/esxi5.1/x86_64/hypervisor/mboot.c32
 APPEND -c xcat/netboot/esxi5.1/x86_64/hypervisor/boot.cfg.stateless -S 1
tty2port=com1 -s 115200 com1_baud=115200
IPAPPEND 2


I let xCAT generate all the files so I usually don't think too hard about
the appearase of generated files, but there they are.


On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 3:58 PM, Daniel Pittman <daniel at puppetlabs.com>wrote:

> G'day.
>
> I am trying to boot the ESXi 5.5 (and 5.0) installer through iPXE, and
> have run into a roadblock: once I chain load to the mboot.c32 supplied
> as part of the ESXi installer, the client simply hangs with 100
> percent CPU use, and makes no further progress.  No obvious attempts
> to try and fetch more content from the client machine.
>
> I am booting the `undionly` version of iPXE, and that works fine for,
> eg, CentOS and Ubuntu network installers.  I have also verified that
> the ESXi installer will run on the client by using the `sanboot` hook
> to connect the ISO image and boot off that.
>
> My boot script, absent error handling, is:
>
> imgload http://172.16.226.5:8080/svc/repo/esxi55/mboot.c32 -c
> http://172.16.226.5:8080/svc/repo/esxi55/boot.cfg
> boot
>
> My build of iPXE does have COMBOOT support listed in the available
> features.
>
> I have found that booting to pxelinux, then using that to load iPXE,
> then chaining to the mboot.c32 loader, works.  I would much rather
> avoid the second bootloader in the chain, though, if I possibly can.
>
> I also considered using the native multiboot support in iPXE, but it
> appears that the ESXi modules are compressed, and iPXE doesn't
> natively support uncompressing them -- leading to a failure to boot.
> (If this can be resolved by changing my build of iPXE, I would be
> perfectly happy with that; I would rather not mess with the ESXi
> supplied files to decompress them server-side if I can avoid it,
> though.)
>
>
> My concrete questions are:
>
> 1. Should I expect a COMBOOT module like the VMWare custom `mboot.c32`
> to run with `undionly` iPXE?
> 2. Can I build iPXE with MBOOT support and zlib decompression?
> 3. Can anyone direct me to how to get this working otherwise?
>
>
> I couldn't find anything in the list archives, or the broader
> Internet, that answered the first question; for the second I saw there
> were some patches but I didn't see evidence they were merged.
>
> I have not actually tested the server-side decompression of mboot
> modules from the ESXi installer, which at least some folks noted made
> it possible (along with a patch to up the number of mboot modules
> supported in iPXE) to boot the installer "natively".
>
> --
> Daniel Pittman
> ⎋ Puppet Labs Developer – http://puppetlabs.com
> ♲ Made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons
> _______________________________________________
> ipxe-devel mailing list
> ipxe-devel at lists.ipxe.org
> https://lists.ipxe.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/ipxe-devel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/attachments/20131010/75ecf0a1/attachment.htm>