Open Stack

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Angelo Matarazzo" <matarazzoangelo at gmail.com>
> To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> 
> Hi folks,
> I would add the pxe boot capability to Nova/libvirt and Horizon too.
> Currently, compute instances must be booted from images (or snapshots)
> stored in Glance or volumes stored in Cinder.
> Our idea (as you can find below) is already described there [1] [2] and
> "aims to provide a design for booting compute instances from a PXE boot
> server, i.e. bypassing the image/snapshot/volume requirement."
> There is already  a open blueprint but I would want to register a new one
> because it has no update since 2013.
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/libvirt-empty-vm-boot-pxe
> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Nova/Blueprints/pxe-boot-instance
> What do you think?
> 
> Thanks beforehand
> 
> Angelo

Hi Angelo,

As you may have noticed I have previously commented on this blueprint and created the Wiki page to begin trying to collect ideas on this subject. Ultimately though for the use case I was looking at it ended up proving to be easier to store an iPXE image in glance and using that as the initial boot media - at least in the short term.

For Libvirt/KVM (and I assume other supported hypervisors) changing the guest configuration to support network boot would be easy enough but the wider question I think is how the PXE boot server is to be presented. Does it need to be on the primary interface managed by dnsmasq or secondary interface(s) attached to external provider networks? What are your thoughts on how to approach it?

Thanks,

Steve