iPXE is the leading open source network boot firmware. It provides a full PXE implementation enhanced with additional features such as:

• boot from a web server via HTTP
• boot from an iSCSI SAN
• boot from a Fibre Channel SAN via FCoE
• boot from an AoE SAN
• boot from a wireless network
• boot from a wide-area network
• boot from an Infiniband network
• control the boot process with a script

You can use iPXE to replace the existing PXE ROM on your network card, or you can chainload into iPXE to obtain the features of iPXE without the hassle of reflashing.

iPXE is free, open-source software licensed under the GNU GPL (with some portions under GPL-compatible licences), and is included in products from several network card manufacturers and OEMs.

Network booting is cool. Once you have setup everything you can stop juggling iso images in your virtual machine configs. Instead you just kick a network boot and pick whatever you want install from the boot menu delivered by the boot server.

This article is not about the basics of setting up a boot server. The internet has tons of tutorials on how to install a tftp server and how to boot your favorite OS from tftp. This article will focus on configuring network boot for libvirt-managed virtual machines.

Broad, standards-compliant support for both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6

• Free-open source, shared under MPL 2.0 licensing

• Direct address assignment (DHCPv4 and DHCPv6) or DHCPv6 prefix delegation

• Dynamic IP addressing and static host reservations

• Dynamic DNS for updating DNS records as leases are renewed or expired

• Tracking of MAC addresses, even in DHCPv6

• Extend and customize Kea through Hooks

• Add and change subnets and pools without restarting Kea

• Store leases and host reservations in a MySQL, PostgreSQL or Cassandra database rather than a text file

• Replace the entire Kea configuration, or separately manage leases, subnets and host reservations through a REST API

• Comprehensive Developer and Administrator documentation.

• ISC offers commercial 7 x 24 support for Kea, as well as consulting and contract development to assist in implementing Kea, including migration from ISC DHCP.

Kea runs on Linux, BSD, and MacOS, like ISC DHCP. The Kea distribution does not yet include a DHCP client or relay, but because both are standards-based, the ISC DHCP client works fine with the Kea DHCP server. Kea is under active development.

Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers. We give system administrators the power to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy applications, and proactively manage servers, on-premise or in the cloud.

Provision from anywhere

Bare metal, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, OpenStack, Libvirt, oVirt, VMware, and many other providers allow you to manage a hybrid cloud through Foreman

Configuration

An external node classifier, hiera-like parameters, and reports monitoring for Puppet, Salt and Chef are included. Completely ready to tweak host groups in your data center.

tl;dr: this post explains how the new openstack-tempest-ci-live-booter package configures a machine to PXE boot a Debian Live system running on KVM in order to run functional testing of OpenStack. It may be of interest to you if you want to learn how to PXE boot a KVM virtual machine running Debian Live, even if you aren’t interested in OpenStack.

These instructions will walk you through booting Container Linux via iPXE on real or virtual hardware. By default, this will run Container Linux completely out of RAM. Container Linux can also be installed to disk.

A mininum of 1024M of RAM is required to boot Container Linux via PXE.