Hiya,
I have spent some time recently trying to put together a PXE boot environment to build ESX servers.
This was helped no end with the release last week of the Universal Deployment Appliance:
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=366
If I do the build on a standard network patch configured with a single VLAN, connected to the ESX hardware it works perfectly.
Unfortunately my ESX server network connections use VLAN tagging to provide standby capabilities for the SC and Vmotion.
I have two physical network patches with 802.1q trunking set at the Cisco end which provide VLAN tagging for two VLANs. One for the SC and one for vmotion.
Once the ESX server is built I then have a portgroup for each VLAN - this all works fine.
Unfortunately if I try to PXE boot the ESX server off a network patch with 802.1q tagging set at the Cisco end, then it fails to find a DHCP server.
I am guessing that this is because the PXE boot agent on the NIC can not deal with the 802.1q trunking?
Can anyone confirm if my suspicions are correct? - or even better does anyone know of a way of getting it to work in this config?
I appreciate I have some other options:
a) I could remove the 802.1q trunking during the build process (but that is another team's responsibility - so they would not be too happy to keep having to reconfigure the cisco ports for me)
b) I could just use a CD or USB mem stick to boot from instead of a PXE server. I will revert to this option if necessary.
Cheers
Dinny