PXE Network Booting

[alsbury]

I searched and read through the forum for anything to do with network booting and PXE, so I apologize if I am asking an answered question.

It seems that proxmox does not support network booting with PXE. Not being a Linux expert, I was wondering if anyone knows a way to convert the proxmox ISO to make it PXE bootable. Installing it at home was a breeze, but installing in in a datacenter is proving to be more challenging without this feature.

Any input on this would be much appreciated.

 

[tom]

I searched and read through the forum for anything to do with network booting and PXE, so I apologize if I am asking an answered question.

It seems that proxmox does not support network booting with PXE. Not being a Linux expert, I was wondering if anyone knows a way to convert the proxmox ISO to make it PXE bootable. Installing it at home was a breeze, but installing in in a datacenter is proving to be more challenging without this feature.

Any input on this would be much appreciated.

not supported. in one of the upcoming changes on the road to 2.x it will be easier (and documented) to install a standard Debian Lenny and on top Proxmox VE packages.

currently the best way is to choose a server house offering Proxmox VE installations service by default (like OVH) or advice someone there to walk to the server.

 

[alsbury]

Wow! that was a quick reply, thanks for answering my question so quickly. Proxmox is awesome, can't wait to see what 2.0 has in it.

 

[Ninjix]

Tom,

I'm interested in PXE booting 12 Proxmox host nodes. Is this feature still planned for 2.0? Let me know if I can help test this once your team releases the 2.0 betas.

 

[tom]

not on top priority - just for my understanding, can you explain again your needed setup?

 

[Ninjix]

It's not really "needed" feature at this point but the idea of PXE booting our multiple Proxmox hosts off the network came up during our future infrastructure planning. The goal would be to not install physical hard drives in the servers at all and rely on our SAN. Ideally we want this to be a feature the Proxmox Team can cover with commercial support. I looked through the forum to see if anyone has done this before and found this thread.

 

[rbeede]

Bump.

I'd like to see this feature too. I could then setup a large cluster of machines with no local disks which would make cooling much easier.

 

[tarax]

With v2.0 coming with PXE and standard install based on debian... I'm hardly waiting to see massive deployement scenarios using FAI or other similar toys...

On PXE side, it would be cool too if one could set a VM to boot with PXE. This would allow similar provisionning funkiness.

Keep on the good work
Bests

 

[Ninjix]

I should of followed up to this thread a while ago. In our lab, I was able to get Proxmox 1.8 to PXE boot from iSCSI using the Etherboot WIKI as a guide.

http://etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/debian_lenny_iscsi

Just make sure you %s/xen/kvm/ig as you read the guide.

 

[dietmar]

On PXE side, it would be cool too if one could set a VM to boot with PXE. This would allow similar provisionning funkiness.

I think that already works.

 

[tarax]

ah yes ! Just have to set boot device to "network" ?!
So I just have to see which of FAI/Cobbler/... would be the most nicely integrated with PVE...

Thx Dietmar

 

[Suntrust]

Hi,

I followed the proxmox install guide on ​

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_ISCSI_installation

but was not able to get it to work. i used Debian wheezy during the bootstrap process and also used the pve-test apt repository. i added following in /etc/apt/sources.list on the boot disk:

deb ​

http://ftp.debian.org/debian

wheezy main contrib
deb ​

http://download.proxmox.com/debian

wheezy pve-no-subscription
deb ​

http://security.debian.org/

wheezy/updates main contrib
deb ​

http://download.proxmox.com/debian

wheezy pvetest

i also installed pve-kernel-2.6.32-27-pve kernel instead of pve-kernel-2.6.32-4-pve which is mentioned in the install guide. the pve-kernel-2.6.32-27-pve is required by the proxmox test repository. Besides this i followed all the steps mentioned in the installation guide. We are using ipxe chainloading for the installation. The diskless server gets an ip from the dhcp server and displays the grub menu but after that the boot process gets stuck and a black screen is shown. No error messages are displayed.

Thanks.​