Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE

For the past several years my desktop has also had a disk dedicated to maintaining a Windows install. I’d prefer to use the space in my PC case for disks for Linux. Since I already run a home NAS, and my Windows usage is infrequent, I wondered if I could offload the Windows install to my NAS instead. This lead me down the course of netbooting Windows 11 and writing up these notes on how to do a simplified “modern” version.
↫ Terin Stock

The setup Terin Stock ended up with is rather ingenious, to be honest. They had to create not just an environment in which netbooting through iXPE using iSCSI, but also a customised Windows PE ISO that included the necessary drivers to make installing Windows onto a iSCSI-connected remote drive possible in the first place, because they’re not included in the Windows installation ISO. This isn’t exactly a standard setup, of course, so there were a few roadblocks to clear before getting there.

They now have Windows 11 booting from a drive in their NAS, and it seems it doesn’t affect gaming – the reason why they did this in the first place is an online game that hard-requires Windows – at all. Installing the game through Steam took a bit longer, sure, but regular gameplay seems unaffected, and there’s no saturation on the network or disk. You’d think this would be wholly too slow to be suitable for gaming, but I guess at least some games handle this just fine. My uneducated guess is that more demanding games that rely on a ton of disk activity to load textures and so on will have a much more difficult time running.

In any event, this intrigues me, and I’m kind of curious to try and set this up myself, if only for the memes. It looks like fun.