Disaster recovery for the PXE provisioning infrastructure

BMC recommends deploying the PXE provisioning service infrastructure at each satellite site where a significant number of servers might use the service.

In the case of small satellite sites where the demand for PXE provisioning service is not large enough to warrant the implementation of a dedicated PXE provisioning infrastructure, you can usually forward provisioning-related traffic (such as target-to-client PXE broadcasts, TFTP requests, and so on) to the PXE provisioning infrastructure at a larger site.

Implementation

For the scenario in which all sites have their own PXE provisioning infrastructure, failure at any one site should not affect provisioning services at any other site, assuming that all supporting services such as the database and data store server remain available to the provisioning infrastructure at those other sites.

For the small satellite site scenario, to forward provisioning-related traffic to another site's provisioning infrastructure, you perform the following actions:

1. Configure the networking infrastructure at the satellite site and at the supporting larger site to route the traffic as needed.
2. Reconfigure the DHCP server to use the new PXE infrastructure.

In this scenario, loss of the larger site's provisioning infrastructure implies a loss of provisioning services at the satellite site.