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

Bill, Shao,

If this issue is being caused by your secondary (and potentially tertiary
and so on) NICs PXE ROMs being registered by gPXE's UNDI driver, is it
perhaps possible to disable the PXE ROM on your non-primary NICs by editing
your VMX file or your VM's BIOS, similar to the way PXE ROMs can be disabled
in the BIOS of most modern motherboards?

I'm not entirely sure if VMWare supports that, but my thinking is that it
would solve your problem if such an option does exist.

-Andrew Bobulsky

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Miller, Shao <[email protected]>wrote:

> Bill,
>
> In your VMware two-NIC scenario where you are chainloading gPXE from the
> PXE ROM code provided by the VM itself natively:
>
> You wondered about the address 15ad:0720.  I believe that those are the
> PCI VENdor and DEVice IDs for both NICs.  My possibly-incorrect guess is
> that this collision is what causes both NICs to use the UNDI driver for
> the second NIC only, since its PXE ROM code is found last.
>
> Are you serious in that undionly.kpxe and/or undionly.kkpxe shows _no_
> adapters from 'ifstat'?  This is hard to believe.
>
> Ah yes, concerning iSCSI best practices of having one adapter for iSCSI
> and the other for all other traffic: I'd totally forgotten about this
> best practice, but it makes perfect sense.  In your situation, I think
> you've said that you don't want the choice of which adapter does which
> to be too difficult to change.
>
> You might be interested in the information available at
> http://etherboot.org/wiki/appnotes/port_winnt_sanboot.  You can
> pre-populate every "slot" in the VM with a NIC, install them all in
> Windows, make sure the appropriate services are set to boot-start, then
> any one of the adapters should allow you to boot, though I'd recommend
> installing Michael Brown's sanbootconf package to help out with such.
> If you're not using a VM in production, you can similarly pre-populate
> every slot; as long as you have two of the NICs, you boot from one with
> the other in a new slot for each boot.
>
> - Shao Miller
>
>
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