[gPXE] VMware gxpe booting problems

[Christopher & Amy]

Hi

I am having problems with gPXE booting a virtual machine and maintaining 
a connection to an iSCSI target. The goal is to have a diskless vmware 
guest (windows server 2008) booting of an iSCSI target.. Briefly the 
environment is as follows:

ESX3i VMware guest configured with NIC, cdrom, and RAM only
ROM image downloaded from rom-o-matic, gPXE v1.0.1
The NIC has been modified to the Intel e1000 as per the instructions in 
http://etherboot.org/wiki/romburning (very successful)
Windows DHCP configured with option 12 - hostname, option 17 - 
root-path, and option 175 - gPXE, and a reservation for the ip address
Windows Server WDS is being used to in native mode to do network installs.

When starting the vm guest, gPXE loads the iSCSI target is attached, but 
no drive appears in the Windows setup. It is Windows 7 which has iSCSI 
suport built in. The command prompt shows the correct ip address and can 
ping the iSCSI server.

I have tried removing the dhcp reservation and writing an embedded 
script to connect to the iSCSI target. This results in gPXE 'booting 
twice'. It actually goes through the script 2 times. During this time 
the network comes up for a few seconds then shutsdown and obviously no 
disk is avialable in Windows setup. Strangely, it also leave Windows 
without an network interface which is doesn't do with a 'generic' 
rom-o-matic ROM.

I want to avoid chaining images and want to keep the Windows WDS setup, 
it works with hardware NICs that PXE boot (3Com3c905B). Hence why the 
script was written and embedded in to the ROM. Is this what is referred 
to as an embedded image??? Why does the network drop?? This was seen 
using a simple ping during boot.

The vm guest has no idea to fall back to the cdrom, even when the WDS 
server is stopped.

I do not have a Linux pc to build images nor do I have the expertise. 
The gPXE authors have this running, what am I missing???

thanks for any help

Christopher