Diskless Booting from iSCSI Target

logicmate · Sat Nov 16, 2013 2:14 pm

Hi,
So I found the below document explain on how you can use PXE boot to boot disk-less over iSCSI.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/tmplink ... IBoot.pdf‎

The document explains on how to mount an existing image file for virtual disk so that the computer can boot from.

My question is, if you don't already have an existing image, how do you install the OS on the existing image file being used?

Thanks,
Ara

Mon Nov 18, 2013 3:03 pm

Hi Ara,
You can use StarWind V2V Converter for converting files with vhd\vmdk formats into img files. These can then be used for iSCSI boot.

logicmate · Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:15 pm

I got it working the say you suggested, however I took an image of a Ubuntu installation, it starts booting but then crashes.

my initial guess is due to hardware configuration changes. Is there a way to install an OS from the actual machine that is booting via PXE? or that is not possible?

what is the best approach to make sure that we minimize the risk of crashing due to hardware mismatches?

Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:40 pm

You can install Windows on iSCSI disk from the scratch. See:

http://ipxe.org/howto/wds_iscsi

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... scsi-setup

You can install Ubunitu (like any other Linux) to boot from iSCSI from the scratch. See:

http://www.heath-bar.com/blog/?p=267

Hope this helped

logicmate wrote:I got it working the say you suggested, however I took an image of a Ubuntu installation, it starts booting but then crashes.

my initial guess is due to hardware configuration changes. Is there a way to install an OS from the actual machine that is booting via PXE? or that is not possible?

what is the best approach to make sure that we minimize the risk of crashing due to hardware mismatches?