Beginners • Raspberry Pi 4 Network Boot ESXi

Hi Raspberry Pi Community,

I'm new to Raspberry Pis and am trying to have several Raspberry Pis (Model 4b) boot from a single Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB-attached hard drive. Here's my setup currently:
-> rpi0 (Raspberry Pi Model 3) running OpenWRT as DHCP server
-> rpi1 (Raspberry Pi Model 4) running ESXi VMWare ARM Fling (currently runs fine and boots from 128 GB USB)
-> rpi2, rpi3 and rpi4: all Raspberry Pi Model 4 (4 GB RAM)
They are all connected to a switch via ethernet.

What I want to do is setup rpi2 as a PXE Boot Server (with 1TB Hard drive attached with needed boot files and iso images) and have rpi3 and rpi4 boot into ESXi from rpi2. I assume this can be done as I have watched other people on YouTube boot a Pi from another Pi before. How would I go about doing this?

Any help with my project would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

Statistics: Posted by philio1327 — Wed Mar 05, 2025 7:43 pm — Replies 0 — Views 39

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