Booting Windows guests via iSCSI

[ericsl]

Hello All,

I have been doing some research on booting all of my guest Windows OS's via iSCSI. There are several reasons that I want to do this but the primary one is that my SAN, Compellent, has a lot of features that I can only really take advantage of if I boot the guest machines directly from the SAN. If I use VMDK files all of the guest servers are under one volume, which is not what I want.

I have been testing the Open Source EtherBoot Project gPXE solution.

So far I have been able to get the VMware NIC to connect to my DHCP server, get a reserved static IP address and connect to the iSCSI target (I can see it connected from the target server). Then it just hangs with a black screen and does not boot.

Heres some other background stuff:

I originally booted the guest server from the VMDK disk and cloned the drive to the iSCSI target. Then removed the disk and changed the boot sequence to the gPXE iso on the CD drive

I am running ESX 3.5

Windows Server 2003 guest

Thanks,

Eric

[ericsl]

Well, you are not going to believe this but while I was writing all this stuff the guest OS booted from the SAN!

So there you have it. You can boot a guest Windows server from an iSCSI SAN, completely bypassing the VMDK files.

Here's how I did it:

)Installed the OS to a standard VMDK.

2)Installed the Microsoft iSCSI initiator (boot version) and logged onto target "boot1" and to logon automatically

3)Copied the OS disk to iSCSI target disk "boot1" with Paragon Disk Copy

4)Used the Rom-o-matic for gPXE version 0.9.3 to create an ISO image to boot from CD. I choose the pcnet32:pcnet32 -- NIC but another one might work better.

5)Pointed the CD Rom to the .iso file

6)In the BIOS I change the boot order to boot from the CD .iso file

7)Added a Root Path entry for a DHCP Reservation for the MAC address of the guest vm NIC: iscsi:192.168.1.99::::boot1

7a) I found that I had to have at least one SCSI vmdk drive even if it is just 1MB and it must be the first drive....

8)Booted up and it worked!

There might be an eaiser way. I would be interested in hearing about it because this took me about 4 hours to figure out!

Eric

[ericsl]

Update: The reason it took so long to boot from iSCSI was because of the pcnet32 NIC card that is a default for 32 bit os's is VERY slow. I changed to the e1000 Intel NIC and it runs MUCH faster. If you don't know how to do that you can read about it in this thread: http://communities.vmware.com/message/899817

This community has been great.

Eric

[FredPeterson]

Broadcom's here and I noticed no discernable difference booting from an iSCSI LUN on a NetApp vs a slightly old Hitachi SAN. Worked immediately first try. Using the software initiator too.