VMware VS4-ENT-PL-A - vSphere Enterprise Plus, Setup Manual, Page: 133 / 276

n
Network adapter with PXE support on the target ESXi host
n
IPv4 networking. IPv6 is not supported for PXE booting.
Use a native VLAN in most cases. If you want to specify the VLAN ID to be used with PXE booting, check
that your NIC supports VLAN ID specification.
Procedure
1 Create the
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg
directory on your TFTP server.
2 On the Linux machine, install PXELINUX.
PXELINUX is included in the SYSLINUX package. Extract the files, locate the
pxelinux.0
file and copy
it to the
/tftpboot
directory on your TFTP server.
3 Configure the DHCP server to send the following information to each client host:
n
The name or IP address of your TFTP server.
n
The name of your initial boot file. This is
pxelinux.0
.
4 Copy the contents of the ESXi installer image to the
/var/lib/tftpboot
directory on the TFTP server.
5 (Optional) For a scripted installation, in the
boot.cfg
file, add the
kernelopt
option on the line
following the kernel command, to specify the location of the installation script.
Use the following code as a model, where
XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
is the IP address of the server where the
installation script resides, and
esxi_ksFiles
is the directory containing the
ks.cfg
file.
kernelopt=ks=http://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/esxi_ksFiles/ks.cfg
6 Create a PXE configuration file.
This file defines how the host boots when no operating system is present. The PXE configuration file
references the boot files. Use the following code as a model, where
XXXXXX
is the build number of the
ESXi installer image.
DEFAULT menu.c32
MENU TITLE ESXi-5.x.x-XXXXXX-full Boot Menu
NOHALT 1
PROMPT 0
TIMEOUT 80
LABEL install
KERNEL mboot.c32
APPEND -c location of boot.cfg
MENU LABEL ESXi-5.x.x-XXXXXX-full ^Installer
LABEL hddboot
LOCALBOOT 0x80
MENU LABEL ^Boot from local disk
7 Name the file with the MAC address of the target host machine:
01-mac_address_of_target_ESXi_host
.
For example,
01-23-45-67-89-0a-bc
.
8 Save the PXE configuration file in
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg
on the TFTP server.
9 Boot the machine with the network adapter.
PXE Boot the ESXi Installer by Using PXELINUX and an isolinux.cfg PXE
Configuration File
You can PXE boot the ESXi installer using PXELINUX, and use the isolinux.cfg file as the PXE configuration
file.
See also
“About Installation and Upgrade Scripts,” on page 144 and “About the boot.cfg File,” on page 154
Chapter 6 Before You Install ESXi
VMware, Inc. 133