Network boot (PXE) for VMs - Why is this disabled?

[special circumstances]

I've just made the move to SCALE from CORE mainly to replace bhyve with kvm - it went well really.

However one problem I found is (as far as I can tell) there is no method to configure a guest VM to primarily boot using the NIC (and permanently so)

The device order settings appear to have no effect with regards to boot device order (fair enough - they don't claim to).

I've looked at the running config for the VMs, and I can see that '-boot strict=on' is set, that the harddisk device is always set to have 'bootindex=1' and that there is no bootindex set at all for the NIC. This combination I think has the effect of preventing any possibility of PXE boot for the VM.

This is a real shame, because I was hoping to use my TrueNAS VMs with Openstack (which really does appreciate network booting nodes).

I can of course overwrite the config files with virsh, but as TrueNAS re-writes these when the VM is launched that's no help really.


Have I missed a checkbox somewhere?

Is there any way of adjusting/affecting the VM configuration/options further?

Is adding this simple option to the API anywhere in the roadmap?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Have I missed a checkbox somewhere?

Is there any way of adjusting/affecting the VM configuration/options further?

Is adding this simple option to the API anywhere in the roadmap?

TrueNAS is trying to maintain middleware source code commonality between Scale and Core. As bhyve doesn't have PXE boot capability, Scale KVM VMs also don't have PXE boot capability.

As VMs on TrueNAS are a nice-to-have feature, rather than a critical capability for storage and sharing, it's unlikely this will be on the roadmap anytime soon. You're welcome to create an iX Jira account, and submit a feature request.

 

[special circumstances]

TrueNAS is trying to maintain middleware source code commonality between Scale and Core. As bhyve doesn't have PXE boot capability, Scale KVM VMs also don't have PXE boot capability.

As VMs on TrueNAS are a nice-to-have feature, rather than a critical capability for storage and sharing, it's unlikely this will be on the roadmap anytime soon. You're welcome to create an iX Jira account, and submit a feature request.

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate the thinking there, but it seems a bit harsh to "force disable" such things without permitting some sort of workaround. It would be good though to allow for some sort of "expert" option to enable simple adjustments like this perhaps...

I'll pop something on Jira.

PS PXE boot did work on TrueNAS CORE, but only as a fallback (you couldn't force the order).

 

[unixland]

It is not disabled. It is very much possible in TrueNAS Scale. Just make a new VM but leave the boot image empty. It will then boot into the uefi shell. type exit [enter] and you'll get a new boot menu. There you can select the boot manager, where you can select PXE boot. Works like a charm, at least for me (with netboot.xyz).