[Fedora-xen] PXE boot with Xen

[Michael DeHaan]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 10:43:09AM -0700, Curtis Doty wrote:
>   
>> 8:41am Curtis Doty said:
>>
>>     
>>> 11:20am Michael DeHaan said:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Alexander Todorov wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>>   Hello,
>>>>>   Is it possible to create a xen guest than will use PXE boot for 
>>>>>           
>>>> initial
>>>>         
>>>>>   installation?
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>> Someone's done something with hacking a wrapper around pygrub to do
>>>> something like this, though you might also be interested in "koan" for
>>>> automated installs.
>>>> This will do basically the same thing and also pull in your preferences
>>>> for RAM size and disk file size from the profiles -- so you still get
>>>> fully automatic and repeatable
>>>> network installs.   Koan is paravirt only at the moment though more virt
>>>> types are next up on my list.
>>>>
>>>> http://cobbler.et.redhat.com
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> For fully virt, I was able to use an etherboot ROM image. Since it just 
>>> uses ISOLINUX to load the ROM, make it hdc:cdrom with boot=d and PXE away!
>>>
>>>       
>> Better yet, the boot=n feature that's been in xen-unstable since December 
>> appeared in rawhide a couple weeks ago. :-) It looks much more elegant as 
>> the ROM is now included with Xen, avoids the ISOLINUX wrapper, and has 
>> some timeouts set properly.
>>     
>
> Yes, for those who didn't notice, we changed our plan for rawhide fairly
> late in the game & switched from 3.0.4 to 3.1.0 since there were very
> compelling reasons to jump straight to 3.1.0. This means you do get the
> new 'boot=n' option for PXE fullyvirt guests. We've not had time to
> get PXE support into virt-install or virt-manager for F7 GA release, but
> we'll be releasing an update with it shortly after GA.
>
>
> Regards,
> Dan.
>   
It would be cool if it could also read cobbler profiles for installation 
sources too... (wink wink, nudge nudge)

I know quite a few large install bases have environments where PXE is 
not an option either due to not
having control over DHCP :)