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The Ultimate Deployment Appliance will help you deploy your servers or workstations. The goal of the project is to be able to fully deploy a computer by booting to PXE and choosing the prepared operating system template. Of course this is already possible, but as I discovered, it takes a lot of time to setup a service like this. This appliance will do it for you. Windows, Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse), Solaris X86 and VMWare ESX 2.x.x and 3.x.x are supported.Connect your laptop to an uninstalled system with a network cross-cable, boot the server up with PXE and choose the operating system template you have prepared on your laptop. This appliance is geared towards totally unattended installations, so after choosing the template you can sit back and relax.
The appliance will mount the ISO files of your operating system install CD/DVD’s and import only a very small subset of the files required for PXE booting other clients. Installation files and packages are served by the appliance right from the ISO images (samba/nfs/http).
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Boot from SAN with HP QLogic QMH2462 & Windows 2003
If you’ve found this you must be having all the difficulties I had to get boot from SAN working properly with the QLogic QMH2462 Mezzanine card for HP c7000. From what I have read the Emulex Mezzanine cards work fine out of the box, but they’re double the price!
You will need:
To install Windows 2003 you must load the QLogic Boot from SAN drivers to the Windows install. You can do this by either hitting F7 to load drivers during install, or by slipstreaming the drivers in to the Windows 2003 install.
But before we do that we must first setup the QLogic BIOS to prepare for boot from SAN. If you don’t have a local connection to the blade you will need to use the Java KVM iLO option to allow for ALT+Q within the browser. On booting your blade, hit CTRL+Q or ALT+Q to go in to the QLogic BIOS.
We now know the storage is online and mapped to the bootable Mezzanine WWN. You should see a host WWN presented on your SAN switch and/or storage.
A good guide how to slipstream drivers with nLite can be found at komku.blogspot.com
Slipstream one of the drivers (32bit or 64bit) and burn to CD, then install Windows as normal.
When the Windows installation completes you will need to install/enable MPIO. More information can be found at Microsoft – Download SANSurfer from HP which will prep Windows 2003 and even 2008 for MPIO.
When installed run HP Systems Update to bring everything up to date.
Test failover.