![]() ![]() The personal investment of time and scarcity of instructional material made it very apparent this isn’t something just anyone can get up and running. Pretty quickly it became clear why it never took off in the consumer space. For the past few years I’ve been studying it in my free time. The idea of booting from a network resource, it always fascinated me. # see /usr/share/doc/dhcp*/nf.(i)PXE, this small built-in program. ![]() There are many more settings to check out than shown in my example # The DHCP configuration in this small PXE environment is quite easy, the configuration file is located at /etc/dhcp/nf. Please ensure that you configure the DHCP server only to serve addresses to a subnet where production won't be affected or in such a way that it'll only serve the clients you intend to! Configure the DHCP serverĪfter installation of all services proceed to setting up your DHCP server. This installs the mentioned DHCP, TFTP and HTTP services as well as syslinux which is required for PXE and xinetd which in turn is required for syslinux. Sudo yum install dhcp tftp-server syslinux xinetd httpd Install servicesĪfter deploying a CentOS VM I'll start by installing the required services. I will use CentOS 7 for my deployment server but you should be able to port most of it to other distros as well. The HTTP service will come in play when we talk about kickstart files and stuff for specific configuration. I will use HTTP in my example and that service is also installed on the same server hosting TFTP and DHCP. If you want to use an external DHCP server that should also work fine, you'll only have to specify where the TFTP service is hosted and the configuration file the client should look for.ĭepending on your use-case you might also need to store some configuration files on a service available over the network. You will also need a DHCP server which can be installed on the same server hosting TFTP. So first of you'll need to build a server for hosting the TFTP service. VMware documentation (which is quite good on this topic), - William Lam's fantastic source of how to automate (almost) all things vSphere,Īnd who has a 3-part PXE blog series on how to do pretty much the same as I needed to do. This post is just to show how we did it (as well as a way for me to look back and check what we did if I need to troubleshoot or redeploy later on).įor inspiration and guidance I've primarily used three sources. They will also be more generic than this one. Many of these will probably explain how, what and why better than this post will. There is also lots of articles on building an environment for deploying ESXi. There is tons of blog posts and guides out there on how to install and configuring a PXE server, both for Windows and Linux. With that we decided to look into building a small deployment solution ourselves. ![]() There is a new major version of OneView coming, version 4, which has more features and integrations than before, but from the publicly available FAQs I can't find anything about it supporting OS deployment Furthermore after an unofficial chat with a HPE employee it seems that it won't be anytime soon either. When preparing for deployment of a new batch of servers we found that Proliant Gen10 servers is not supported by ICsp. ![]() monitoring, firmware), but for provisioning ESXi to the servers we have been doing some of it manually and some of it with HPE Insight Control Server Provisioning (ICsp). We use OneView for managing the hardware it self (i.e. In our environment we run ESXi primarily on HPE Proliant servers. ![]()
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