Since Provisioning Services became part of the Citrix product portfolio, we talked a lot of different options to spend PVS target devices information necessary to download the bootstrap and connect to the PVS infrastructure. I will not reiterate all options in this blog, so if you need to get up to speed check eDocs -. Getting the Bootstrap
fileOne of the most popular options is to use DHCP option 66 (Boot Server name) and Option 67 (Boot File Name). The disadvantage of this approach is that both DHCP options to a single input. For example if you specify PVS1 as boot server and PVS1 down target devices are not able to start. Especially if you use a common desktop environment and automatically restarting virtual desktop after the user logs off, it can become a serious problem.
Now, you may say, why not just use a load balancer to load balance requests for ties between servers? The problem is that the bootstrap is transferred using TFTP, which is quite difficult to balance the load. See "TFTP load balancing - Anything But Trivial" for details
When Dan Feller spoke of the benefit of PLWHA bootstrap in one of the latest blogs "XenDesktop Fact: Provisioning Services does not require PXE ". He received a very interesting comment form Justin Garrison. in short Justin mentioned that it is possible to deliver the bootstrap using HTTP and is running the configuration without any problems for some time now.
Unbelievable! How could we have missed that for so long? The HTTP load balancer is much simpler than TFTP, so it would be an interesting option to simplify a PVS infrastructure without relying on emissions (PXE) or using ISO files (BDM).
So what is the story here?
After seeing this comment I got to the development team PVS immediately. Soon it became clear that the transfer of the bootstrap using HTTP is not defined in the formal specification PXE (http://download.intel.com/design/archives/wfm/downloads/pxespec.pdf), so that we miss very obvious. But we also realized that there are other PXE implementations as gPXE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPXE), which add many more features (HTTP transfer incl.). "Coincidentally" XenServer virtual machines based gPXE-use, so a bootstrap transfer based on HTTP is actually a viable option.
But before too out about it, I must tell you that we do not test based on bootstrap HTTP transfers as part of testing a standard version. So while this may work -and I'll show you that it works in a minute- not officially supported .
Nevertheless, I thought it was geek enough to blog about it and show you the required configuration. All you really need to do is specify the complete HTTP path in option 67 (Boot File Name) on your server or scope but let DHCP option 66 (Boot Name Server) empty . You configuration should look like this:
then XenCenter open and powering on an appropriate virtual machine. You should see something similar to this:
Unfortunately, I have no vSphere and Hyper-V host to see if it also works there. I would be happy to get feedback to understand if one XenServer feature or bootstrap a viable delivery option for all virtualization platforms.
[Update] The new 10.1 release of NetScaler Load Balancing TFTP has become much simpler than it used to be in the past. More information can be found in eDocs -. 10.1 Improvements
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