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by BobbyTables2 656 days ago
Indeed, but iLO virtual media performance (at least used to be) so slow that it was silly.

Booting a live cd or installing windows at 1MByte/s speeds (late 1990s CDROMs were faster!) is horribly slow. Maybe iLO5 was a bit better.

usually found it easier (but annoying) to just walk over with a USB drive…
2 comments
jasomill 656 days ago
Agreed — installing modern Windows from physical DVD-R media is painful enough.

I've found iLO 4 virtual media support most useful for booting DOS-hosted firmware updates supplied as El Torito ISO images that aren't natively bootable from USB flash in a world where you can no longer find CD-R blanks at every corner drug store, and where newer machines commonly lack the legacy BIOS support required to boot the image at all.

It's also a fine way to boot minimal BSD or Linux rescue/netinstall images that don't involve live-booting a full desktop environment, or for installing smallish OSes like ESXi in cases where trading increased wallclock time for slightly reduced effort is justifiable.

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BuildTheRobots 656 days ago
If you use the web (or older java) console to share the ISO as a virtual drive then it tends to be dog slow. If you SSH into the iLO then you can point the virtual CD drive at a HTTP web server hosting the image which seems to be significantly quicker to read. It uses HTTP range requests for random IO too, so doesn't need to pre-read the entire ISO.
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