re: Booting Hyper-V VMs off of iSCSI?

Steve Marfisi — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:01:41 GMT

There's one more way to do this - and it does not require exposing iSCSI via the parent partition. You can access iSCSI via a software initiator when booting from the VM's NIC using PXE....it can then chain and bootstrap 2003 / Vista / 2008 etc. using the Microsoft software iSCSI initiator within the guest VM.

Better yet, you can boot a diskless 2008 Server Core with Hyper-V from iSCSI, and then its guest VMs themselves can also boot from iSCSI without having to define any additional LUNs on Server Core.

Steve Marfisi

emBoot Inc.

re: Booting Hyper-V VMs off of iSCSI?

Jose Barreto — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:41:23 GMT

My original post at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/02/14/storage-options-for-windows-server-2008-s-hyper-v.aspx was misinterpreted. I said that Hyper-V does not have a *native* option to boot from from the iSCSI LUN exposed *directly* to the guest (not exposed to the host). I did mention that you can boot from a passthrough LUN (iSCSI or FC).

To clear any misunderstanding, I have added a second post at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/03/05/more-on-storage-options-for-windows-server-2008-s-hyper-v.aspx, making that detail absolutely clear and showing some pictures to help further differentiate the two scenarios.

As Steve from emBoot mentioned, you can also use a thirdy-party solution that starts with a PXE boot and then chains to iSCSI.