I have a usb of Ventoy in my everyday carry, it has Windows, Linux and Recovery images and has saved my bacon a number of times over the years.
In my lab environment outside of the VM Host it can often be difficult to get exactly what I need loaded quickly, especially when my bag isn’t around. I recently stumbled on iVentoy written by the same author of Ventoy, which is a free, lightweight PXE boot server that simply lets you boot ISO images and supports booting into UEFI BIOS without issues. There is a paid and free edition which enables commercial use and more than 20 clients, for lab purposes, the free edition is plenty.
Simply extract the zip file, copy across your ISO files into the iso directory and start the program. It should then load into the web management interface. By default there is a MAC address whitelist, which only allows clients listed to connect. In my setup I have disabled this and simply allow any client in my local network to connect. You’ll also need to set some DHCP options. In my Home environment I’ve got a UDM Pro SE, so under Settings > Networks and enter the Network and under DHCP Management, enable Network Boot and Point to the machine hosting along with the PXE boot filename. I’ve also got TFTP configured pointing to the same IP.
If you’re doing this in more enterprise environments running Aruba or Cisco gear, then simply create an ip helper-address config pointing to your PXE server. This is similar to what you’d do if you have WDS. The recommendation is not to set DHCP options if you can help it.
Aruba-2930f(Config)# ip helper-address 192.168.xxx.xxx
Finally, under Configuration in iVentoy, make sure you set DHCP Serve Mode to External. While there, you can configure settings like the boot screen resolution a default ISO image or inject additional configurations. In my configuration I’ve also gone to MAC Filter and set it to Deny mode, where only a device whose MAC address matches the list will be denied (so the list is empty…).
Now that it is all setup, you can then boot up a physical machine or virtual machine to use the PXE Boot server.
This is a great time saver for those in small environments where you don’t have WDS or any existing deployment methods and want to move away from USB sticks.
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