Fusion, netbooting OS X and the bless command, something isn't working.

[colinj]

Howdy all,

I have what may be a unique situation and I'm looking for some guidance.

I've got Fusion 7.1.0 (2314774) up and running on a MacBook Pro and everything is working just fine except for netbooting to install versions of OS X.

I can install OS X in to a VM with the standard installers and that works just fine. What I am then trying to do is use the following bless command to get the VM to reboot from a Netboot server.

sudo bless --netboot --booter tftp://nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/mavericks.nbi/i386/booter -kernelcache tftp://nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/mavericks.nbi/i386/x86_64/kernelcache --options "rp=nfs:nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn:/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0:mavericks.nbi/NetBoot.dmg"javascript:;

All of the relevant files do exist and are all on the same server. It is the case that the Netboot server is not on the same subnet/VLAN as the MacBook running fusion. All seems to be fine and the bless command reports that the EFI has been updated. However, when I then reboot the VM it simply boots back in to the vanilla OS X 10.9 that is on the VM.

Can anyone spot anything that I am missing? Should this work?

Please and thank you

Colin Johnson

[dariusd]

Hi Colin,

Our virtual machine's NetBoot implementation is not as complete as Apple's, but we've tried to cover the most common use cases... It wouldn't surprise me if your use case was outside the boundaries of what we have implemented.

I'll put it on my to-do list to try this, figure out whether or not it should work (and whether it can be made to work) and get back to you with the results.

Thanks,

--

Darius

[dariusd]

OK, I've investigated it here and it looks like we'll need to do further work to implement support for directly blessing a specified NetBoot bootloader over TFTP.  For now, we can only boot from servers which are discovered automatically, from a NetBoot server on a directly-attached network (or possibly where there's a DHCP relay to the NetBoot server on a remote network).

I don't immediately see any workarounds.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[colinj]

Thank you for the follow-up on this Darius. I'm glad to hear that this is something you can look at. I'm sure you have lots of other things on your plate as well.

Please let me know if I can provide any information that might help things along.

Thanks!

Colin J.

[glenlarson]

Has any additional development happened for Fusion here?  It sure would be much nicer if we could mimic real hardware more realistically.

I'm trying to use the netboot to a machine on my subnet and find I only can do this if I change the boot order to boot network first.  On real hardware, I can use the bless command (sudo bless --netboot --server bsdp://[IP address]) and restart.  On VMware, it doesn't boot to the network when I restart.  Should this be working at this point, or also not implemented for the local network using bless? 

[dariusd]

Thanks for the feedback!  Our currently released products do not support directly blessing a specific boot server.  We're aware of the need for this feature... I can't say when it might be implemented though.

Cheers,

--

Darius