Virtually Nick

RE: ESXi + PXE

Jim Nickel — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:36:55 GMT

Sorry...I should have been more clear. I wasn't talking about getting PXE boot going....just the driver.

I don't know how to get this RTL 8169 driver working in ESX 3.5. I did get it working in ESXi.

Thanks for your time,

Jim

RE: ESXi + PXE

nick.couchman — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:32:02 GMT

Georg:
Feel free to contact me with questions. I don't always respond in a timely fashion, so I'll apologize in advance!

RE: ESXi + PXE

nick.couchman — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:31:32 GMT

Jim:
ESX 3.5 is a different beast. The reason why ESXi works so easily is because it reads all of the boot files directly to RAM and then creates the root filesystem in RAM. It then has utilities to manage changes and stuff like that and write those things back to the actual filesystems. ESX, on the other hand, does a lot of local disk transactions and requires that you have things in the right places. Booting this via PXE would require not only the PXE/TFTP server, but also you would have to mount a lot of filesystems over NFS or something similar so that ESX had it available. I've never looked to see if anyone has tried this before, but it is a lot more work. The one thing that would work somewhat easily is booting ESX via iSCSI, especially if you have an iSCSI HBA. Even without an iSCSI HBA, it may be possible to use the software iSCSI initiator in ESX and modify startups and such so that it works. Not sure about that one...

RE: ESXi + PXE

Jim Nickel — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:13:43 GMT

I saw the instructions to get this driver working on ESXi and tried it and it worked!

However, how do you get it going on ESX 3.5 (not ESXi)?

Jim

RE: ESXi + PXE

KidLark — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:52:21 GMT

Hi Nick,

sounds cool to me. I' gonna try this too. If I run in to trouble, can I ask you a few questions?

Regards

Georg