Private PXE boot network with KVM

Question

I'm setting up a group of KVM guests on a corporate network that provides DHCP and DNS services.

The KVM guests will be assigned static IPs by corp DNS. The guests need to be accessible from the corp network, and need to access the corp network themselves.

One of the guests will be a Linux kickstart server and will expose Kickstart URLs on the static IP assigned by corp DNS.

However, I want to create a private PXE environment for my KVM guests that will point them at the static corp IP of the kickstart server. The DHCP/PXE services should not be visible to the corporate network.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '17 at 14:01

If the boot server exports the tftpboot directory also via http too you can simply do this (in the libvirt network configuration) to netboot via http:

<network>
  [ ... ]
  <forward mode='nat'/>
  <ip [ ... ]>
    <dhcp>
      [ ... ]
      <bootp file='http://192.168.2.14/tftpboot/pxelinux.0'/>
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>

Otherwise you can use this for classic tftp boot:

<bootp file='pxelinux.0' server='192.168.2.14'/>

Take care to load the nf_nat_tftp kernel module on the host, talking to the tftp server from the NAT-ed network doesn't work without that.

Private PXE boot network with KVM

1 Answers1