ESX 5.5 supports netboot- anyone using casper imaging with that?

[nkalister]

hello jamfnation- since the introduction of esx 5.5 in september, vmware ESX servers now support net boot. I'm working on re-creating our casper imaging workflow on an esx server and I'm curious if anyone else has looked into doing this at all. I was planning on creating an OS X server VM with our imaging boot drive offered over net boot, then net booting VM's from that and use casper imaging on them to apply the image to the vm.

[nkalister]

interesting- got a 10.9.1 server VM setup and net boot works with no tweaking. Netinstalls of Apple OS installers execute without any errors, but casper imaging is having trouble extracting files from the 10.8.5 and 10.9 installESD.dmg's . . . . .I tried using a distribution point converted to a vmdk as well as imaging online from an AFP network share, same issue both times. Anyone else running into this?

[n3philim]

I'm getting ready to test this out to create some dev VMs -- I'll post back with results as soon as I have them!

[rtrouton]

If you want to try building a custom ISO disk image for ESXi and including a QuickAdd installer, I've got a script that can build custom OS X installers for VMware Fusion and ESXi.

Links:

http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/creating-customized-os-x-installer-disk-images-for-vmwar...

http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/vmware-custom-os-x-installer-script-adds-support-for-vmw...

http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/create_vmware_osx_install_dmg-script-updated-with-maveri...

[nkalister]

since there's some activity on the thread, I'll give an update on what I've been doing with this . . . .
Haven't found a solution for casper imaging's problems running the OS X installer, but standard net installs of the OS over net boot work fine. So, I'm doing a 2-step imaging process right now- the OS is installed without casper imaging using the net install, then I boot the target VM from our casper imaging net boot set and apply everything through casper imaging. Basically thin-imaging the VM's. That works fine.
Also, the casper imaging problem occurs with physical machines net booted from the OS X server VM . . . Only thing I haven't tried is upgrading the server VM version from 8 to 10. I don't have a vcenter server set up, so I'm holding off on that experiment since I'd lose the ability to edit the VM configuration.