Hi all I created a gPXE iso to boot a Win2003 64-bit virtual machine in a VMware 2.0.2 host running on Win2008 64-bit. The target is created with StarWind running on a physical Win2003 32-bit machine. No password, chap, or iSec. Windows Firewalls are off.
Michael Brown kindly helped me out with this and it works great. What I try to accomplish is a straight method to move a boot image of Windows from a virtual drive of a VMware machine (the vmdk boot file) to an iSCSI target and use gPXE to boot from this. And - later - to be able to move the image of the target back to a virtual drive so the VM can run again on its own, should I wish to do so.. What I initially did was to use the StarWind target software which runs on Windows. Then I used the "StarWind V2V Image Converter" to convert the vmdk file (the boot drive of the installed Windows Server 2003) to an img file which was moved to the server running StarWind and mounted as an iSCSI target. This works; with qPXE as an iso file mounted to the virtual cd-rom drive, the virtual machine could boot with Windows 2003 from the StarWind target. I would be happy to use the StarWind target server but it is very expensive. Once they offered a free version (they do no more) which I have, but it only supports two connections in total which isn't of much use. Another option is iSCSI Cake: http://www.iscsicake.com This will not attach the img file, it is much smarter as it can attach the vmdk file as is with no conversion at all. This works with a similar qPXE iso with a script adjusted to the different name of the target, of course. Unfortunately, iSCSI Cake is a little limited in features compared to StarWind and Comstar but the cost is fair - in the $200 range - but still with some limiting in count of LUNs and initiators. Thus I'm looking for other options like OpenFiler but Comstar of Solaris seems much more capable. I use the "EON ZFS Storage": http://sites.google.com/site/eonstorage/ But I have no success in attaching the image files, neither the vmdk file as is, nor a raw img file converted by either the StarWind V2V Converter nor the qemu-img tool using the command: sbdadm create-lu /tank/data/myimage.img The LUN is created with no errors. Having the LUN, all that is needed is a target group and a target. This all works fine. But the initiator cannot "see" the original NTFS file system, thus a boot from the LUN fails. So - with Comstar it is only partly possible. The target LUN is seen at once when connected by the Microsoft initiator, but the disk appears as "Not initialized" by Windows which means that it as a "physical drive" is OK but the file system it carries is not recognized. Perhaps this is just not possible with Comstar, but wouldn't it be nice? /gustav _______________________________________________ gPXE mailing list gPXE@etherboot.org http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe
