Data Center: PXE Boot

If you want to create a Data Center you are going to be installing an operating system on a lot of computers, and you're going to want to do it pretty quickly. How do you accomplish that?

There are 4 ways to get it done:

1) buy the computer with the O/S already installed. that just means that someone else is doing the install, and that has a cost. Maybe if you create a master boot disk, and clone the disk onto other disks, you can take them to new machines. I actually did this about 10 years ago, for about a dozen machines in a single rack.

2) install from a DVD. Worked fine for older machines, but wasn't fast. And nowadays, machines don't come with internal DVD. I have a few that do, but they are Gen 6 and Gen 7. Probably never buying those machines again.

3) install from a thumb drive. Probably faster than a DVD, and all modern machines do have a couple USB ports, but now you're trying to keep track of thumb drives, and I can tell you from experience that that's harder than it should be. I have several thumb drives for ProxMox 9, and I still have trouble keeping track of them properly. They WORK ok, but they're small and hard to see.

4) Network boot. Aka PXE Boot. I think all my machines can do PXE boot, so I finally created a server for this, after one too many times of re-downloading ubuntu-25.iso for VMs.

So PXE is pretty nifty, and once working, is great. There are hard ways and easy ways to do it. I tried a hard way last year, it didn't work, and I dropped it for a while. Thought about writing my own really simple one.

Recently I found an easy way to do this, using a free tool called "iventoy", which you can pick up at http://www.iventoy.com/; I think there's a paid version too that will do more machines at the same time.

Iventoy is super-easy to use. Iventoy has two interfaces, one is a web-page so you can look at what it is doing and the other is a special service to deliver an ISO file to a computer wanting it.

PXE Boot is what you want to do to avoid DVDs and thumb drives. Network is faster, it's easy to use, you set it up once, it can deliver multiple different OSes because it's just a file tool. I think I have it configured with 4 or 5 different ones, for my several needs.

Download iventoy someplace you can use it, unpack it and it's ready to go. Download the ISOs you want, there's a subfolder inside the iventoy folder where you drop them. Run iventoy as root. Look at it from a nearby web-browser window, it will show you a little bit of info, including available ISOs. Click the green rectangle to turn it on.

Now fire up another computer you want to install on, at the right point either press F11 for Boot menu, or F12 to go straight to Network Boot.

In a minute or so, if it's going to work, some messages will scroll by and then you will get the text-based iventoy PXE OS-selection menu, all the ones in the iventoy iso subfolder. Pick one and let er rip! Very quickly you will be at whatever is the starting messages and then menu options for that ISO.

You are good to go!

What I have done is actually create a VM on my first ProxMox machine, and load iventoy into that VM. I have set that VM to autostart on boot, and iventoy is set to autostart via cron inside that VM. That way the PXE Boot Server is ready to go all the time; if the VM crashes it's a quick restart.

So finally this is an easy thing to do. I'd known about it for years but never had a need.

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One last thing about this: you can also PXE Boot the VMs in ProxMox. There's a menu point when creating a VM where you have to tell it the "CD" source you want to use. If instead you hit the radio button for "No CD" it will PXE boot. So you can have one VM PXE Boot from another VM and only need to have the desired ISOs in that one place on that one VM...assuming of course that your networking is properly in place to do this.

There are probably going to be some limitations here that I haven't bumped into yet. Iventoy has a limit of 20 machines using it. I don't actually know what that means, because I hit it once for some reason and a restart wiped that out. So I think you can do 20 in parallel, for whatever you want. I have installed ProxMox itself as the host OS, and ubuntu 24/25 as VMs, on the same machine and different ones.

Iventoy VM seems like one of those things that should be a pre-packaged VM you can just download. I don't know if ProxMox can even do that.