Boot from Fibre Channel

[mcb30]

(2013-04-12 20:14)nry Wrote:  Now I have hit a road block as I don't really know where to go from here, I have a bunch of Qlogic QLE2460 Fibre HBAs and a Fibre switch
My plan is to install Openfiler on my file server as this supports Fibre

How can I boot an ESXi installer iso, and install it to a Fibre target?
Is this even possible with iPXE?

iPXE does support Fibre Channel, but currently the only supported transport is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). iPXE has a complete Fibre Channel stack, but has no driver support for QLogic (or other) HBAs.

It should be viable to add driver support for your HBAs, if you're feeling adventurous (or if you have some funding available). The internal abstraction for FC devices uses fc_port_open() to instantiate an FC port (with a given node WWN, port WWN, and local name), and then xfer_deliver() to handle delivery of raw FC frames. Fabric login, port login, process login, and FCP are all handled by iPXE's software FC stack; the FC device just needs to provide the ability to transmit and receive raw frames.

If you are interested in developing this, then it's probably best to continue discussion on the ipxe-devel mailing list.

Michael