Re: multiple UNDI NICs in VMWare ESX 3.5 cause gPXEDHCP to fail on 1st NIC

Shao:

Nice to hear from you again - we exchanged emails a few months ago when
I first started playing with gPXE.   

I forgot to mention in my original post that I am chainloading gPXE from
the PXE roms built into vmware.   I don't know if that makes a different
or not.   I originally had hoped that the NIC that downloaded gPXE would
leave some sort of special hooks to gPXE would continue to use its
network interface and therefore gPXE wouldn't scan for another NIC.   I
tried the UNDIONLY variant of gPXE, but it never found any UNDI driver
waiting for it....   

The reason that I am using two different NICs has to do with best
practices for iSCSI and performance.   The 1st nic is connected to the
iSCSI network which is dedicated to handling only iSCSI related traffic.
The 2nd NIC is the "normal" NIC that has access to the rest of the world
(including the internet).   I prefer to use DHCP for both NICS because
they are on a virtual machine that moves occasionally to a different
physical site which has different network addresses.   By using DHCP, I
don't have to change anything on the virtual machine itself when it
moves to the other site.   Since each NIC is connected to a totally
different physical network, they aren't redundant to each other.   It is
kind of arbitrary which NIC I use for iSCSI, but I prefer the 1st one so
that if I need to add additional NICs to additional networks later on,
it doesn't move anything else around.   Moving the iSCSI nic around in
Windows when it boots from it is a pain....

It is interesting that gPXE sees both adapters and uses different IRQs
for them.   I suspect as you do that something in the 2nd NIC's setup is
overwriting info in the 1st NIC.

As you did, I noticed also that both NICs seem to be registered to the
same address 15ad:0720, but wasn't sure if that was really a problem.  I
don't know what that address represents.   If it represents a code area,
than it might be appropriate that both NICs share the same ROM code.
gPXE still recognizes that they belong to different PCI slots
(UNDI-PCI00:10.0 & UNDI-PCI00:11.0).

I will be interested in what the experts on UNDI have to say about the
matter....



Bill


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