Comments on: HOWTO: PXE Boot ESXi

By: Mike DiPetrillo

Mike DiPetrillo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:05:39 +0000

Experimental support is all that's there right now. I hear something is targeted for later this year at this point.

By: bwcook0

bwcook0 — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:01:31 +0000

Mike,
Did the ESXi process for this ever come out? All I see is 'experimental' support and a technote that outline the same pxe boot process and no mention of configuration methods or anything. Thanks

By: Dale S

Dale S — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:47:51 +0000

Thank you. I am learning to hate ESXi because of the booting issues I have been having as of late.

By: Parul

Parul — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:31:22 +0000

Thanks!! Mike for replying though. Just an update so that if someone else out there is trying out ESXi 4.0, one change is to append the PBHOST after vmkboot.gz as below:
append vmkboot.gz PBHOST=10.128.132.5:3333 — vmkernel.gz — sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.tgz — install.tgz — image.tgz — lance-boot.tgz ipappend 2

That way I did get the birth message atleast. Now either I cn wait for new technote from VMworld or continue with configuring the Midwife scripts as per my environment requirement.

By: Mike DiPetrillo

Mike DiPetrillo — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:43:28 +0000

Lots of things have changed with ESX 4 for doing this. There's a new technote coming out around VMworld timeframe I believe on how to set all of this up as well as an appliance that's already setup with everything to do this. I'm not the one working on that project but I would just wait for that technote if you can. Sorry I can't be any more help right now.

By: Parul

Parul — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:26:54 +0000

Hey Marc,

I am having the same issue, no birth message. Were you able to get through? I have provided the PBHOST and lance-boot.tgz in my boot file as below:
append vmkboot.gz — vmkernel.gz PBHOST=10.128.132.5:3333 — sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.tgz — install.tgz — image.tgz — lance-boot.tgz ipappend 2

My ESXi 4.0 installation halts for user inputs after loading all the modules including lance-boot.tgz.

Any idea what can be missing?

By: Rupali

Rupali — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:01:03 +0000

Hi Mike,
A couple of quesions:
#1. I am trying to do stateful PXE boot install for ESX 4.0. I am using “append vmkboot.gz — vmkernel.gz —sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.tgz — image.tgz — install.tgz” in my configuration. However, the image.tgz does not load entirely and hangs at a specific point. I had extracted the ISO as per the VMWare document. Can you point out what can be the probable cause of the image.tgz load failure? I tried giving mem=512M as well and also tried using the SYSLINUX mboot.c32 instead of the default ISO mboot.c32. But invain. Please help.
#2. Is there any official document from VMWare for ESXi 4.0 stateful install via PXE boot?

Thanks and Regards,
Rupali

By: Automating ESXi Builds - PXE and Custom CD - InterVirt VMware

Automating ESXi Builds - PXE and Custom CD - InterVirt VMware — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:43:00 +0000

[...] http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/11/howto-pxe-boot-esxi.html [...]

By: Mike DiPetrillo

Mike DiPetrillo — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:15:57 +0000

Most people wanting stateful use a deployment tool such as Altiris.
I'll see what I can dig up for a free(er) way to do this.

By: BJones

BJones — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:36:44 +0000

Thank you all for your excellent ESXi pxeboot instructions. The stateless configuration is great, but I am interested in an ESXi pxeboot setup that would write ESXi (with custom configuration parameters) to disk. Based on my testing and the posts on this site, it doesn't seem like there is a workable *stateful* solution yet. If anyone has this working, please let me know. Thanks!