PXE boot Lab

This lab isn't practical for Azure. There are no deployment files. You can use this lab locally in a VM, like Hyper-V.

This lab combines anonymous ftp, dhcp, and PXE boot.

Normally, you'd keep a series of images around to spin-up Hyper-V VMs using differencing disks as boot drives, but if you want completely indepentent systems to maximize portability, PXE is a good way to go.

You can use the provided hyperv_create.ps1 function to create a VM for this:

hyperv_create 'PXE Client 01' -gen 1 -memory 2GB --networkBoot $true

Note: I don't buy into the PowerShell module nonsense (it's far too much like the evil .NET GAC), and ps1 files are apparently the devil on Windows, so, I just keep my ps1 open in PowerShell ISE and run from there.

Make sure the Legacy Network Card is on the same network as the PXE server.

Because this uses DHCP, you might have to alter your main DHCP server, turn it off, or whatever. In a lab scenario, you might create a private network in Hyper-V. I can't guess what you will use. Personally, I keep various "Private XX" (e.g. Private 01) networks around.

You also need to have a Linux ISO first (the script is for CentOS 7.2):

Set-VMDvdDrive -VMName 'CentOS 7 (Lab 01)' -path 'H:\ISO\Linux\CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso'

Jump over to root to paste in the service-install.sh setup script.