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Jiri B
Asked: 2021-08-20 04:14:33 +0800 CST

ESXi installation PXE boot with GRUB on BIOS (not EFI)

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all documents mention syslinux/pxelinux as a way to pxeboot ESXi installation, but I'd like to stay with GRUB 2. How to do that?

I'm able, of course, to load GRUB 2 via network (i386-pc/core.0 for non-UEFI host) but then I can't figure out what should I put to load mboot.c32 or if it is possible to boot b.b00 somehow directly.

vmware-esxi grub pxe-boot vmware-vsphere grub2

1 Answers

  1. You need to configure GRUB for network boot. The GRUB Networking documentation can be viewed on local machine with: pinfo grub2 --node=Network

    A more advanced alternative to grub for PXE booting is iPXE. I find iPXE to be a better replacement for PXELINUX. You can build an iPXE bootable image that suits your needs, or download a generic one. You need just UNDI driver for BIOS and SNP for UEFI. iPXE is very configurable: you can have menus, authentication; supports iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, HTTP(S)... And it's possible to boot ESXi with it.

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