HyperV 2012R2 boot to iSCSI via iPXE

[davids]

Hi,
I am new to iPXE and diskless booting so hopefully someone can help.

I am in testing mode using the standard iPXE.iso and running manual commands which as far as I can tell are working ok up to the windows installation where it cant find a disk. I suspect I need to do something with the iSCSI iniatiator in the boot.wim but thought I would ask a few questions first.

Q1. If I let the stardard iPXE boot it doesnt find the dhcp server and get an address, however when I CTRL-B and type DHCP it gets it straight away. Should I use DHCP || Retry_DHCP in a script to get round this when I compile my own custom image?

Q2. I simply boot with iPXE.iso on a USB pen, CTRL-B and type DHCP to get my IP.
Then I type sanboot iscsi:192.168.1.29::::iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:hyperv-rep01-golden-target
This attaches the VHD as disk 0x80 and fails to boot. This is good as its just a blank VHD.
I then type exit and my bios continues to boot from DVD which has HyperV 2012R2.
We start this install and it gets as far as picking a disk to install to. It shows nothing but asks for drives to be installed.
(My Windows 2012 Storage Server shows the iSCSI Target connected ok so I know it looks good from that side of things).

Thanks

[robinsmidsrod]

About the DHCP issue: I think you're using port spanning (or whatever it's called) which makes the switch ports init slowly, which means dhcp times out, because the link-up takes too long. Try enabling something called portfast (or something). That's supposed to work.

You need to type "sanhook" instead of "sanboot" for the iSCSI drive to stay around after you exit. If you still have issues, you might need to point the gateway value in iPXE to the iscsi server, because of a stupid Microsoft iSCSI initiator issue. set net0/gateway 0.0.0.0 usually does the trick. This is because your router might not be set up properly wrt. routing messages back to the local lan segment.