[SOLVED] iSCSI boot from SAN in VMWare Workstation 9

RootMason · 06-06-2013, 11:53 PM

Hello all!

I have created an iSCSI Target (Debian Wheezy) and an iSCSI Initiator (CentOS 6). Installation from netinstall (of CentOS) on eth0 to LUN0 /dev/sdb1 on eth1 (Debian) worked just fine. Adjusted BIOS on VMWare to boot from e1000 first. On boot (VMWare Workstation 9) immediately tries to PXE boot, not iSCSI...

Any big brains in here know what I'm doing wrong? I've got about 16 hours sunk in trying to develop this project so any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance for your time!

gdejonge · 06-09-2013, 04:20 AM

Unless your BIOS supports iSCSI, you'll be having a hard time booting from your SAN.

Cheers

RootMason · 06-10-2013, 12:08 AM

Yes, and that's exactly what my problem ended up being: VMWare Workstation doesn't support iSCSI boot. The answer to the problem is PXE chainloading. It requires the OS to be installed to the iSCSI Target, DHCP to serve an address to the Initiator, TFTFP on the Target to serve a gPXE (or iPXE) script that then provides the initiator with the ability to inititiate an iSCSI connection. Bam! Bootable thinclient on a machine that only supports PXE! Thanks for the response, buddy!