Basically we have a number of Dell SC1425's we use as diskless machines booting from Starwind.
We have recently bought a second "SAN" machine to give us some failover capability, so we were looking at how this fitted in with our booting technique.
We have been happily using Emboot for a couple of years, but with the market moving on more machines / NICs are supporting iSCSI booting natively, we took the opportunity to reevaluate our position.
It seems the new Intel NICs are shipping with iSCSI boot facilities, however these are only on the PCI Express based cards and the 1425's only have PCIX.
This seemed to be taking us back down the emboot route, however this meant our boot server became a single point of failure, unless we bought a secondary server licence, and more client licences. This initself seemed a bit short term, as sooner or later the hardware would be upgraded, leaving emboot redundant.
So after a bit of a search I came across etherboot / gPXE. This opensource project allows you to create an iSCSI boot image. (www.etherboot.org)
It was a bit fiddly building a CD (I had to setup a Linux build environment), but now I have a bootable CD, that starts a machine spins up the network, and via DHCP reservation options connects to the correct starwind target
If anyone else would like a copy of the ISO please drop me a PM
Si
