vmware esx pxe boot guest wds

Question

I have WDS set up to PXE boot for physical hosts in my network, but when I try to boot from a newly created VM on an ESX server, I get the following error:

 PXE-E53: No boot filename received

 PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE Rom
 Operating System not found

Is there some trick to getting PXE boot to work on a VM? Is there a particular way to set up the networking? Perhaps something needs to be reconfigured on the PXE server?

Answer 1

Thought I would post what the solution turned out to be. WDS PXE service had a "wait time before responding" that someone had set to 30 seconds. I noticed that vmware ESX vms only polls PXE for maybe 10 seconds. ... they just weren't waiting long enough.

I lowered the "wait time before responding" setting, and all is well.