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Appendix A. Additional procedures

A.1. Creating bootable media

The P2V Client can be booted from PXE boot, a bootable USB device, or optical media. Scripts for preparing boot options are included with the rhel-6.x-p2v.iso ISO in the LiveOS directory.

A.1.1. Create a P2V client boot CD

The exact series of steps that produces a CD from an image file varies greatly from computer to computer, depending on the operating system and disc burning software installed. This procedure describes burning an ISO image to disk using Brasero which is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
Make sure that your disc burning software is capable of burning discs from image files. Although this is true of most disc burning software, exceptions exist.
  1. Insert a blank, writable CD into your computer's CD or DVD burner.
  2. Open the Applications menu, choose the Sound and Video sub-menu, and click Brasero Disk Burner.
  3. Click the Burn Image button.
  4. Click the Click here to select a disc image button.
  5. Browse to the rhel-6.x-p2v.iso and select it for burning.
  6. Click Burn.
Your BIOS may need to be changed to allow booting from your DVD/CD-ROM drive.

A.1.2. Create a bootable P2V USB media

  1. As root, mount the rhel-6.x-p2v.iso: 
    mkdir /mnt/p2vmount
    mount -o loop rhel-6.x-p2v.iso /mnt/p2vmount
  2. Attach your USB device to the computer. For the livecd-iso-to-disk script to function, the USB filesystem must be formatted vfat, ext[234] or btrfs.
  3. From a terminal as root run the livecd-iso-to-disk script: 
    bash /mnt/p2vmount/LiveOS/livecd-iso-to-disk /PATH/TO/rhel-6.x-p2v.iso /dev/YOURUSBDEVICE
  4. When the script finishes successfully, eject the USB device.

A.1.3. Create a PXE boot image

  1. As root, mount the rhel-6.x-p2v.iso 
    mkdir /mnt/p2vmount
    mount -o loop rhel-6.x-p2v.iso /mnt/p2vmount
  2. From a terminal as root run the livecd-iso-to-pxeboot script: 
    bash /mnt/p2vboot/LiveOS/livecd-iso-to-pxeboot /PATH/TO/rhel-6.x-p2v.iso
    When the command successfully completes, there is a tftpboot directory in the directory from which the command was run.
  3. Rename the newly created tftpboot directory to a more descriptive name: 
    mv tftpboot/ p2vboot/
  4. Copy the p2vboot/ sub-directory to the /tftpboot directory: 
    cp -R p2vboot/ /tftpboot/
    Set up your DHCP, TFTP and PXE server to serve /tftpboot/p2vboot/pxeboot.0 .

    Note

    The initrd image contains the whole CD ISO. You will notice when pxebooting that initrd can take a long time to download. This is normal behavior.