VMware ESXi 5 Interactive PXE Installation Improvements

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Eric Gray

[This still works great with ESXi 5.5 – September 2013]

[UPDATE March 2014 – shell script to automate this process is also available.]

A flexible PXE infrastructure can be a real force multiplier in your technology arsenal.  Fully-automated installs are great time-savers, but there is also value in being able to perform an interactive (manual) install of VMware ESXi, Linux, or Windows over the network.  Physical installation media is becoming less and less viable in this day of lights-out datacenters, and virtual media capabilities provided with remote consoles, such as iLO, are best reserved for punishing junior members of the team.  It’s easy enough to have a Linux-based PXE server coexist with Windows Deployment Services — useful for environments that need to deploy various operating systems on a single VLAN.

William Lam is the de-facto authority on fully-automated ESXi deployments, and others have provided recipes for configuring VMware ESXi 4.1 installation media for interactive PXE installation.

The good news is that with VMware ESXi 5 it is no longer necessary to create the image.tgz file to accommodate a manual PXE installation, and another handy enhancement to boot.cfg makes it slightly cleaner to organize multiple installation sources on a PXE/TFTP server.

Take a look at the following procedures to learn more:

Prepare the VMware ESXi 5 Installation Media

On your TFTP server, simply extract the contents of the installation ISO into a new directory.

# mkdir esxi50
# mount -o loop VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0-nnnnnn.x86_64.iso tmp/
# rsync -a tmp/ esxi50/
# chmod +w esxi50/*

That’s it.  No need to create any additional files with ESXi 5.

Modify the ESXi boot.cfg Configuration File

In order to reflect the fact that the installation source is not in the root of the TFTP server, two tweaks are needed.

  1. Remove all of the slashes (/) from the boot.cfg file so relative paths will be used (vi :%s#/##g)
  2. Add a “prefix” directive to the boot.cfg file to specify the proper subdirectory, from the perspective of the TFTP root

NEW – Both of the above can be accomplished with the following one-liner in one fell swoop:

sed -e "s#/##g" -e "3s#^#prefix=/`basename $PWD`/\n#" -i.bak boot.cfg

End result will look something like this:

This is much cleaner that repeating the full path dozens of times throughout the file.

Add a PXE Menu Entry

Typically the PXE menu is pxelinux.cfg/default; add the following section and you’ll be set:

LABEL esxi50
 KERNEL /esxi50/mboot.c32
 APPEND -c /esxi50/boot.cfg
 MENU LABEL ESXi-5.0.0

Ready for interactive installation

Now you are ready to boot your physical or virtual machines for an interactive installation of VMware ESXi 5.  It’s very easy to run ESXi 5 inside a VM, now with 64-bit nested guest capabilities!

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Related posts:

  1. Automatically prepare an ESXi ISO image for PXE booting
  2. Peaceful Coexistence: WDS and Linux PXE Servers
  3. New network and scripted install features in Photon OS TP2
  4. VMware ESXi and Hyper-V installation comparison
  5. Create ESXi 4 USB flash drives with Workstation
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26 Responses to VMware ESXi 5 Interactive PXE Installation Improvements

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  3. Greg says:
    August 31, 2011 at 7:51 am

    For me the installation stucks after loading 32 modules:

    Aug 31 16:18:41 bootsrv in.tftpd[11019]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename pxelinux.0
    Aug 31 16:18:41 bootsrv in.tftpd[11019]: tftp: client does not accept options
    Aug 31 16:18:41 bootsrv in.tftpd[11020]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename pxelinux.0
    Aug 31 16:18:41 bootsrv in.tftpd[11021]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename pxelinux.cfg/01-bc-30-5b-d3-3f-81
    Aug 31 16:18:41 bootsrv in.tftpd[11022]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename menu.c32
    Aug 31 16:18:41 bootsrv in.tftpd[11023]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename pxelinux.cfg/01-bc-30-5b-d3-3f-81

    Aug 31 16:18:47 bootsrv in.tftpd[11025]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename images/ESXi-5.0-469512/mboot.c32
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11026]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/boot.cfg
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11027]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/tboot.b00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11028]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/b.b00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11029]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/useropts.gz
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11030]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/k.b00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11031]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/a.b00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11032]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11033]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v01
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11034]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v02
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11035]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v03
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11036]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v04
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11037]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v05
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11038]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v06
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11039]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ata-pata.v07
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11040]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/block-cc.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11041]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ehci-ehc.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11042]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/s.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11043]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/weaselin.i00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11044]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ima-qla4.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11045]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ipmi-ipm.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11046]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ipmi-ipm.v01
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11047]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/ipmi-ipm.v02
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11048]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/misc-cni.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11049]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/misc-dri.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11050]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-be2n.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11051]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-bnx2.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11052]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-bnx2.v01
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11053]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-cnic.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11054]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-e100.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11055]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-e100.v01
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11056]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-enic.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11057]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-forc.v00
    Aug 31 16:18:48 bootsrv in.tftpd[11058]: RRQ from 192.168.8.11 filename /images/ESXi-5.0-469512/net-igb.v00

    Any Ideas ?

  4. jkasal says:
    October 3, 2011 at 4:48 pm

    I keep getting the following error…

    Configuration error while parsing /boot.cfg
    Fatal Error: 15 (Not Found)

    I am running my enviornment on Win 2k8 r2 using tftp32. All perms are correct and I have tried both placing the files in the tftp root and in a sub directory and still I get the same error. When trying the different locations I did change the default file and the boot.cfg file to reflect the location change.

    Anyone seen this error or have any ideas?

    Thx

    • JKasal says:
      October 5, 2011 at 2:11 pm

      Figured this one out. Relative paths don’t work in my enviornment for some reason. The prefix neede to be removed and the path had to be added to each file.

  5. Mike M. says:
    October 4, 2011 at 8:11 am

    great info… SOOO Much easier than 4 (or 3!)

    Don’t know if this is unique to me or not. All the files on the ESXi ISO image were in upper case!

    I’m running my TFTP server on Linux, and it took me about 30 minutes to realize the files were in upper case, not lower. ::smack hand on forehead :: Everything worked fine after that when I renamed all “to lower”.

    • Eric Gray says:
      October 4, 2011 at 10:09 am

      Must have had something to do with how you mounted the ISO, or your distribution’s defaults.

      • Mike M. says:
        October 4, 2011 at 12:22 pm

        Using VCD (Virtual Clone Drive) under WinXP to mount the ISO as a drive letter, then WinSCP to copy over to my TFTP Linux host.

        I’ve done the same thing for years with ESXi-3, 4, and other ISOs (Linux, BSD, Win servers) without an issue. Everything had proper case. Not a big deal to me, as I was able to correct the case in a few seconds with a simple script. Just thought it was strange! (Plus I didn’t immediately recognize it, which has me more upset! LOL!)

        Thanks for the tips though. I didn’t know any better, and would have left (and added) all the directory paths in the boot.cfg file for sure. You saved me a bunch of time.

  6. Richard says:
    October 18, 2011 at 9:28 am

    Jeremy’s tip on upgrade pxelinux.0 (syslinux) worked for me in resolving the hang problem. I upgraded using the CentOS 6.1 version of pxelinux.0 with no problems.

    Thanks Jeremy!

  7. kashyap says:
    October 20, 2011 at 6:33 am

    I am getting blank screen after selecting the ESXi 5 from the main menu.
    can any help me what would be wrong.

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  9. Andy says:
    December 2, 2011 at 1:33 am

    I get a Fatal error: 15 (Not found) when trying to “Configuration error while parsing /esxi5/boot.cfg.

    In the tftp log i see that “Read request for file ” not working because //, but where does it come from???

    Thanks Andy

  10. stefan says:
    January 31, 2012 at 6:55 am

    I really don`t understand why you copy the files from /tmp to /esx5 or winscp to wherever 🙂

    It makes no sense except you wanna waste storage.

    You have your ISO image on disk… so all you need to do is to mount it as described and point to the directory. You can even do it with automounter 🙂

    auto.iso

    * -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop :/nfs/nas01/ISOs/links/&

    All you need to have is a directory on the nas where you link to the iso and thats it.
    Hope it helps. I setup a complete kickstart env just with iso`s

  11. Ken Hall says:
    July 23, 2012 at 1:05 pm

    You are a godsend! I have read all the sites that talk about setting up esxi5 under a pxeboot environment including william lam, the person you mentioned as the guru. Even his site didn’t explain this so concisely or accurately for that matter. Thank you, I now have a PXEboot environment that serves up i386/x86_64 versions of centos as well as ESXi5 thanks to you and your readers comments.

  12. Peter says:
    October 24, 2012 at 10:47 pm

    Worked like a charm. brilliant. thanks VM

  13. Justin says:
    November 9, 2012 at 11:54 am

    Cheers, works for 5.1 to

  14. Ryan Smith says:
    March 28, 2013 at 2:32 pm

    Additionally an easier way is if you have your OS or ESXi .iso locally from a device you can boot to it and install via Dell DRAC card.

    1. connected DRAC and went in to virtual console
    2. mapped virtual media in console (using DRAC6 version) to my bootable esxi 5.1 flash drive.
    3. Installed ESXi as I normally would to the local (remote) storage or media.

  15. Johan says:
    April 23, 2013 at 7:59 am

    listen here: all I can say ……this install is like a knife throught butter.

    Funny thing, I have a datacentre where the cdroms eject after the install…Wonder if there is a way to stop it from opening?

    Thanks, and its a big thanks for your post…coming from pxe esx4 to esxi4 all flavours, nightmare!!!! to this one that just worked.

  16. mike says:
    February 24, 2014 at 7:23 am

    is this a stateless install like the others? i.e. rebooting means you need to run through the install again?

  17. Eric Gray says:
    February 24, 2014 at 5:12 pm

    Dear Readers:

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    More info is available here: https://vcritical.com/2014/02/top-vmware-blog-contest-2014-voting-now-open/

    Thanks for reading and sharing your comments!

    Eric Gray

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