[ipxe-devel] Booting to MDT or Windows Image

[Michael Brown]

On 08/04/2020 21:50, Keith Jackson wrote:
> I came across your guide on how to boot SCCM through HTTP. I want to 
> know if you have a guide or walkthrough on how to do this with just MDT, 
> or even just an image file created by MDT? I'm facinated by ipxe and 
> booting through HTTP, however I want to know the limitations and cons. 
> For instance, will we be able to boot a 2 - 6 gb windows image thorugh 
> HTTP to a remote site?
> 
> Also do you offer instruction on following the steps.

You can use wimboot (https://ipxe.org/wimboot) to boot an arbitrary 
Windows PE image via HTTP.  There is a (slightly outdated) walkthrough 
document at

   https://ipxe.org/howto/winpe

As for limitations: this will depend almost entirely on the bandwidth 
you have available to your remote site.  You should get approximately 
the same download speed with iPXE that you would get with any web browser.

If you are booting multiple machines at a single remote site then you 
may want to investigate solutions such as 2Pint's iPXE Anywhere:

   https://2pintsoftware.com/products/ipxeanywhere/

which exploits BranchCache to avoid having each individual machine 
download the whole Windows image.

For an image of 6GB you will need to use the UEFI version of iPXE, since 
you will exceed the 32-bit address space available under legacy BIOS.

Michael