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Configuring dnsmasq as PXE Server for ESXi 

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One really cool thing that I came to learn while setting up the infrastructure to network boot the latest Raspberry Pi 4 was the use of dnsmasq, which I have used in the past but I did not realize it could do so much more. In addition to providing DNS services, it can also be configured to run TFTP and provide DHCP capabilities which can then be used to support PXE installations.

Another neat feature of dnsmasq is ability to proxy to an existing DHCP server which is extremely useful for anyone with an existing DHCP infrastructure. Given the simplicity of dnsmasq and having already set this up for the rPI, I figure it would also be useful to take folks through in setting up dnsmasq to also support ESXi installations over PXE, since this still comes up from new folks just getting started with ESXi kickstart automation.

For more details about PXE installation of ESXi, I highly recommend this whitepaper and although it states 6.0, the concepts and configurations are still applicable to the latest ESXi 7.0 release.

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UEFI PXE boot is possible in ESXi 6.0

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A couple of days ago I received an interesting question from fellow colleague Paudie O'Riordan, who works over in our Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware. He was helping a customer who was interested in PXE booting/installing ESXi using UEFI which is short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. Historically, we only had support for PXE booting/installing ESXi using the BIOS firmware. You also could boot an ESXi ISO using UEFI, but we did not have support for UEFI when it came to booting/installing ESXi over the network using PXE and other variants such as iPXE/gPXE.

For those of you who may not know, UEFI is meant to eventually replace the legacy BIOS firmware. There are many benefits with using UEFI over BIOS, a recent article that does a good job of explaining the differences can be found here. In doing some research and pinging a few of our ESXi experts internally, I found that UEFI PXE boot support is actually possible with ESXi 6.0. Not only is it possible to PXE boot/install ESXi 6.x using UEFI, but the changes in the EFI boot image are also backwards compatible, which means you could potentially PXE boot/install an older release of ESXi.

Note: Auto Deploy still requires legacy BIOS firmware, UEFI is not currently supported today. This is something we will be addressing in the future, so stay tuned.

Not having worked with ESXi and UEFI before, I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to give this a try in my homelab which would also allow me to document the process in case others were interested. For my PXE server, I am using CentOS 6.7 Minimal (64-Bit) which runs both the DHCP and TFTP services but you can use any distro that you are comfortable with.

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