I had workstation player 12.5.7 loaded on ubuntu 16.06 with ability to use windows winpe, ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 for PXE install. Upgraded to 14.1.3 as that's what CyberPatriot is using this year and it killed PXE because network boot is UEFI. I figured out how to get signed version of grub working partially to install ubuntu, still can't get winpe to work. However even with ubuntu it boots, it thinks it finds a network device, however when it tries to DHCP network information no go. Using tcpdump I don't see any traffic on vmnet8 or vmnet1 during the DHCP stage. Anyway to enable standard PXE (non UEFI) in 14.1.3, or does anyone know how to fix the NIC issue with ubuntu netboot and how to get winpe to just load? Thanks. I don't need UEFI, not sure why VMware forces it for network boot.
I was able to get VMware player 14 to use old fashion bios by removing the line firmware = "efi" from the VM .vmx file. This is sub optimal as you have to do it outside the GUI but at least it worked. One thing of note, under 12.5 it only took less than a minute for the PXE image to load so I could start the install, with 14.1 it takes around 10 minutes to get to the same point. If anyone has thoughts on how to speed this up I'd love to hear them, I'd love to get the secure UEFI network boot stuff working so as of now still leaving this as needing a solution.
Message was edited by: Brian Prather Added the fact that the PXE boot under 14.1 is way slower than under 12.5
