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RKuehn
Contributor
Contributor

Automated Installation ESX4 with PXE and VLAN Tagging

Hi,

I saw several threads at VMTN and Google which stated that an installation will not work with PXE Boot and a network interface which has several VLANs (VLAN Tagging) on the ESX Server.

But I found a solution.

I configured one VM as the UDA Server. The network adapter in VM is connected to the ESX-MgmtLAN.

My ESX Server (HP BL685 G5) has got 6 network cards.

Each network port has got several VLANs (VLAN Tagging) and I configured on NIC 1 the VLAN 112 and VLAN 15 - and VLAN 112 is the ESX MgmtLAN.

So my VM is directly connected to the ESX-MgmtLAN and my blade has two VLANs on the first NIC.

At first I configured NIC 1 for PXE boot and to use the correct VLAN - in this case VLAN ID 112

The ESX Server is now able to get an IP from DHCP and will get the vmlinuz and initrd via tftp from UDA.

I used the kernel options to tell the installation proccess of VMWare ESX to configure the NIC correctly.

I used:

ksdevice=vmnic0 vlanid=112 ip=10.8.18.150 netmask=255.255.255.192 gateway=10.8.18.129 nameserver=10.8.18.140 mem=512M ks=http://10.8.18.190/kickstart/TEST/ESX1.cfg initrd=initrd.esx4.esx40

This "kernel option" string can be modified with \[variables\] in UDA to be more flexible.

That's it.

Regards

Rainer

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