Open Stack

Hey all,

On 01/12/2021 23:33, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> In order to test OCI [1] within OpenStack itself, I would need my
> instances to do PXE booting. This would be with something like this on
> the qemu command line:
>
> qemu-system-x86_64 -boot n
>
> I believe this would also mean setting-up network cards that can do PXE
> booting, like the e1000, which Qemu supports.
>
> If that is possible, then I would setup DHCP + tftp-hpa on another
> instance, wired on the same private network.


On 03/12/2021 21:01, Cedric Lemarchand wrote:
> We faced the same use case, and we end up doing something like this:
>
> - disable security on the network provider (or on the instance port 
> where pxe boot is needed)
> - deploy or rescue the intance with an ipxe image


I ran into this exact issue in the past, searching for possibilities to 
boot Nova instances using PXE.
Certainly the actual boot server should not be provided by Nova in any 
way - it's more about getting a VM to network boot.

Actually the only change required would be to enable netboot via the 
boot order:

   * https://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#specifying-boot-order


There also have been blueprints or implementation attempts for nova before:

  * https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/boot-order-for-instance
  * https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova-specs/+/133254/


Maybe if someone from the Nova devs would give an indication if 
supporting network boot would  be worth discussing?
The most basic use-case certainly are staging environments for physical 
(server) systems that do network boot.
But I believe there likely are more ideas others could contribute.



Christian