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Custom HPE ESXi 6.0 U2 (April 2016) breaks PXEboot with Kickstart Approach

Hello Community,

I have developed a small Linux Appliance to serve as a DHCP and PXEBOOT server in order to stage small to large numbers of esxi hosts at our customer's sites leveraging the kickstart configuration installation option. Most of our customers use HPE servers so we usually use the HPE custom image to install those hosts.

In all previous images everything went fine. However in the most current release (april 2016 for esxi 6.0 U2) HPE has decided to use a uppercase character in the vib for the ams agent (used to be: hp_ams.v00 now it's amsHelpe.v00).

The iso itself does no use Joliet or Rock Ridge extensions so there is to my knowledge no way of having a linux appliance mounting that iso file with this one character in upper case. I have spent all day trying to find a solution but to no avail.

The next approach involved editing the iso and changing the one character to lowercase. However this did also not work out as hoped because there seemed to be a hardcoded version of the uppercase definition somewhere that I could not find. I edited the following two files:

/BOOT.CFG

/EFI/BOOT/BOOT.CFG

The only real solution that I can see right now is to rewrite the code in my appliance to copy the contents of the iso instead of just mounting it. After the copy has finished rename the amshelpe.v00 to its original form amsHelpe.v00

I hope this post helps someone running into the same problem. I'd also be happy to learn of new ideas and approaches some of you in the community might have in this regard.

Edit: We just heard back from HPE. They will fix this issue in the next rollout of the custom Images.

Message was edited by: Dario Dörflinger

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