OK, so I now have a combination of things that will successfully PXE boot a Linux qemu-kvm virtual machine with Windows DHCP services and Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I'm using the gPXE CD ISO image to PXE boot the VMs. Now the WDS PXE process works as expected.

We have our WDS/RIS server setup similar to the following wiki article on the syslinux wiki:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/PXELINUX#Deploy_Linux_from_Wind...

Here's what I did on my workstation (I'm using Fedora 11):

[UPDATE]: Read the updated article here

So VMware Server 2.x on Fedora 11 has been driving me nuts. I recently re-imaged my workstation and decided to ditch VMware Server and give Linux qemu-kvm a try since it is now the default hypervisor in Fedora and will be the standard hypervisor going forward in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (http://www.redhat.com/rhel).

We are an almost exclusively Windows shop so we use Windows DHCP servers and Windows Deployment Services (WDS/RIS) server to image all of our workstations and servers via PXE booting. If we were using an ISC dhcpd server things would probably have been a lot easier. Below I describe how I get things (partially) working.

I've had this a couple of times now in the last few weeks. I wanted to try out the Linux KVM virtualization hypervisor that comes with Fedora 11 since VMware Server 2 is giving my fits on F11 x86_64 so I installed qemu and all the supporting packages via yum.

I realized that I can't do some things with KVM that I can with VMware Server so I'm putting up with the signal 6 crashes every week or so and went back to VMware Server 2.0.1 for Linux. In order to get that running I had to apply some patches to get the kernel modules compiled but that's been done for a while.