defaulting pxe boots with hpsa

I recently found a very helpful nugget with regards to OS Provisioning with HP’s Server Automation product.

OS Prov is most typically done using PXE (or the similar bootp process). SA provides a PXE server that gives a boot menu to network-booted systems. That menu contains a variety of choices: linux, windows, winpe, etc.

In most environments, one particular OS will be dominant, and typically one particular version of that OS – whether it be RHEL 5 x64 or Windows 2008 R2, it’s usually just one that makes up the lion’s^* share of systems on the network.

If you know that you will be provisioning, say, Windows 2008 R2 90% of the time, it would be nice to not have to always have to pick it manually from the PXE boot menu.

Here’s what you need to do to make that happen (presuming you want to use Build Plans):

Edit the following file:

/opt/opsware/boot/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

For example, if you have this at the beginning of the file:

"prompt 1
default local
timeout 100
display pxelinux.msg
implicit 0"

Change it to this for the OGFS version of winpe64:

"prompt 1
default winpe64-ogfs
timeout 100
display winpe64-ogfs.msg
implicit 0"

You can use the above process – modified, of course – for any of the available boot images.

^{*_{And if you’re provisioning Mac OS X 10.7, “Lion” makes up all the share 🙂}}