StarWind Software

Thought I'd put something back into the forum, and share my latest sucess!!

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

Great news! We do partner with Emboot guys but "it's always good to have an option!" (c) ...

We can put this CD image on our download site here and even may ask our engineers to create an etherboot manual for diskless boot thing via gPXE. Favoring your copyrights of course

That's great news - I had a go with gPXE but couldn't get Windows 2003 Server with the iSCSI Initiator (Boot Version) to work properly!

We'll have a gPXE boot manual soon. So everything will be MUCH easier

adamhearn wrote:That's great news - I had a go with gPXE but couldn't get Windows 2003 Server with the iSCSI Initiator (Boot Version) to work properly!

Hello.
Do you already have gPXE boot manual?
If yes how - can I get somehow it too?
I am dealing with SAN boot over Infiniband (both Linux and Windows).
Unfortunately I can’t configure gPXE because lack of information - how to do it.
I will really appreciate any additional information that can help.

Alex

Unfortunately we don't have gPXE manual ATM and I have no idea when we'll have one. The topic could be hardly called "hot" according to the customers feedback and we're a bit short in time with the other things... Sorry about this

alext wrote:Hello.
Do you already have gPXE boot manual?
If yes how - can I get somehow it too?
I am dealing with SAN boot over Infiniband (both Linux and Windows).
Unfortunately I can’t configure gPXE because lack of information - how to do it.
I will really appreciate any additional information that can help.

Alex

simonmac wrote: 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

Mind posting some info? Been going down the AoE route, but there are no AoE Windows targets, so if I can use iSCSI to boot XP hosts off a Windows iSCSI target I'd prefer to use that. I PMed you as well. Thanks in advance!

+1

I managed to use **** to boot from native linux via AoE using gPXE. However, I require a Windows native target, so I tried setting up Starport/Starwind. I managed to get gPXE to boot off my image but it crashed right away. I installed a fresh XP with network drivers and Starport. Then dd'ed the partition to my StarWind server and shared it via Image File Device. Will try again tomorrow.

Thank you very much! Please keep us updated about your progress. We really appreciate your efforts!

anton (staff) wrote:Thank you very much! Please keep us updated about your progress. We really appreciate your efforts!

Anton,

Off topic, does Starport support Windows "suspend"? **** doesn't allow the system to suspend, says AoE dll won't allow it to suspend. I'm hoping Starport will allow my clients to suspend.

I just realized that the OP was probably referring to Windows 2003 iSCSI boot and not XP. Following the how-to from the etherboot.org website for booting from a SAN for Windows 2003 should work no problem. Just replace the linux iSCSI target with StarWind. Guess I'm SOL for XP boot from iSCSI.

Yes, suspend, hibernate etc are fully supported.

stoked wrote:

anton (staff) wrote:Thank you very much! Please keep us updated about your progress. We really appreciate your efforts!

Anton,

Off topic, does Starport support Windows "suspend"? **** doesn't allow the system to suspend, says AoE dll won't allow it to suspend. I'm hoping Starport will allow my clients to suspend.

Boot-capable MS iSCSI initiator does not seem to work on XP...

stoked wrote:I just realized that the OP was probably referring to Windows 2003 iSCSI boot and not XP. Following the how-to from the etherboot.org website for booting from a SAN for Windows 2003 should work no problem. Just replace the linux iSCSI target with StarWind. Guess I'm SOL for XP boot from iSCSI.

Anton said:

for now -- partially. StarWind can of course be used together with hardware iSCSI initiators to provide boot from iSCSI volumes (it's out of our business what data you do keep on our virtualization software). But StarPort for now cannot be used to boot remotely w/o hard disk. Actual Windows part is not a problem however make Windows boot from iSCSI requires either real-mode iSCSI stack implementation or any other remote boot protocol. We're looking for some sort of the solution b/s you're far from the first who was asking about such a feature.


gPXE is ISCSI aware. Yet it seems like Starport doesn't boot. I tried changing the Starport.sys driver regkey to start on boot, but it still bluescreens. Do you have any hints as to how we can get this working?