After going to all the trouble to get our specialized host configuration set, let’s see what creating a new iSCSI booting VM looks like. I’ll be using virt-manager as the primary interface into libvirt for all of this, and installing Fedora 19 as the guest OS.

In the past year I’ve discovered a need to be able to easily test iSCSI boot configurations, preferably without special hardware or dedicated storage arrays. I’ve come up with this solution for working with virtual machines to test OS installation and boot with iSCSI storage. Obviously this doesn’t replace the need to validate real iSCSI deployment scenarios – but it works for me to easily check installers, kernel iBFT support, initramfs implementations, and system init configuration for iSCSI root.

I’m currently using Fedora 19 as both my virtualization host and iSCSI target, with a variety of Linux distributions running in VMs (primarily multiple versions of Fedora and RHEL).