Provisioning methods - comparison table

Tutorials
1

Bare metal, Discovery and Boot disk

Bare metal PXE Discovery Discovery - PXE less Bootdisk - Full host Bootdisk - Subnet
Prior host creation Yes No No Yes Yes
UEFI supported Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Image size 0 550 MB 100 7
TFTP management Yes Yes No No Yes
DHCP Yes Yes No Yes Yes
Reboot Yes Yes No (kexec)** Yes Yes
VMware On same network Yes Yes Integration in UI No
Bootlader BIOS = PXE BIOS = PXE BIOS = Syslinux BIOS = Syslinux iPXE
UEFI = Grub2 UEFI = Grub2 UEFI = Grub2 UEFI = Grub2 UEFI = Grub2
Usecase Boot over network* Discovering host Can’t boot from the network Discovering host (Can’t) boot from the network, smaller image than a discovery

* Access to DHCP and TFTP from where you can download PXE cfg, kernel and initram disk
** kexec is a mechanism of the Linux kernel that allows booting of a new kernel from the currently running one
*** Some devices may not work with this image

2 Likes
2

I wonder if the table should include iPXE and HTTP Boot stuff as well or not as these are both interesting and important ones.

Also, Discovery - PXE less → Do we support it on UEFI for any hardware? I thought kexec does not work well with UEFI on certain hardware ( or so I can recall from the past discussions )

1 Like