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        PXE Booting a Virtual Machine

Section(s): Installation & Deployment, Networking
Published on Aug 12, 2008.
Last Modified on Jul 29, 2008.
Last Modified by Robert Larson.
Rated 5 out of 5 based on 1 votes.

Trying to install a VM using a PXE server like Windows Deployment Services? You need to configure the VM settings correctly.

Hyper-V supports booting a Virtual Machine from the network using the F12 option. The trick is that you must use the Legacy Network Adapter. The regular network adapter is synthetic is not available at boot time.

You need to do the following things to allow boot from PXE.

Use the Add Hardware option in the virtual machine settings, select the Legacy Network Adapter, connect it the the virtual network that has DHCP and PXE services available.
Boot the Virtual machine and press F12 to boot from the network.
If you already have an OS on the VHD, then you might need to modify the BIOS boot order and boot from the Legacy Network Adapter before the IDE drive.
Once you have finished installing, Remove the Legacy network adpater and set the BIOS boot order back to the default.

About Robert Larson

Robert Larson is the co-author of the Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit, and the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource kit, both published by Microsoft Press. Robert has over 20 years experience in the engineering and IT field. Currently an architect with Microsoft Consulting Services, Robert focuses on helping customers design and deploy optimized data center and server infrastructures using physical and virtual approaches. Robert has been working with various virtualization technologies for over 4 years and is a regular speaker at Microsoft TechEd conferences in the US and Europe on the Microsoft virtualization stack. Robert has also written whitepapers and delivered webcasts on virtualization technologies. You can visit Robert's blog