End-to-End Bare-Metal Provisioning with SCVMM 2012 SP1 / R2 - Part 2 - Configuring DHCP Services.

Hello, in the first part of this series, I walked you through an overview of bare-metal deployment in SCVMM.  Today, I will walk you through the configuration of the DHCP Server service needed to provide support to the WDS / PXE service used by SCVMM as part of the Hyper-V host bare-metal provisioning.

The DHCP Server is the first server contacted by a Hyper-V host after it has been powered-on by the SCVMM Management server.  If the Hyper-V host has been configured to boot from LAN, it will attempt to PXE boot from LAN by first obtaining an IP address from the DHCP server.  The DHCP server must already have an existing DHCP scope and configured with the following Server or Scope Options:

  1. Option 43: Vendor Specific Info: must be set to 01 04 00 00 00 00 FF.  
  2. Option 67: Bootfile Name: this is the boot file name used by the Windows Deployment Services (WDS) role.  Enter boot\x86\wdsnbp.com as the value here
  3. Option 66: Boot Server Host Name: IP address or hostname of WDS Server.  If you are entering a hostname, ensure the DHCP Scope has a DNS Server value
  4. Option 60: PXEClient.  I am adding this one as a reference in case you do not use Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2 WDS on the same host running the DHCP Server service.  If you are using 2012 / 2012 R2, the WDS Server service adds this DHCP option automatically if configured correctly and is installed on the same server where the DHCP Server service is running.  We discuss the WDS Server configuration in the next post of this series

Once the DHCP server's Scope or Server Options have been configured, you should see something like this.  Again, the Option 60 value does not show up yet since I have not configured the WDS role yet and I intend to configure it on the same host as the DHCP server I have in my lab here.  We will cover this next.

Finally, while I describe how to configure the DHCP Server service in Windows Server 2012 R2 here, the same parameters can be configured in Windows Server 2012 and 2008R2.  I have not personally tried this configuration with previous releases but I expect they would work the same as long as the DHCP scope and options are configured correctly.

Till next time.

Adiy