Hi everyone,
I am attempting to do something which is (surprisingly) complex using a Hyper-V virtual machine. Using VMware Workstation I have been able to boot from the network using VMware autodeploy. This loads ESXi 5.5 as the operating system. This works great, but I would like to try to accomplish he same feat using Hyper-V, and I've succeeded. This creates is a nested ESXi 5.5 host.
The process was long and painful, but I have gotten to the point that I am able to successfully boot a Hyper-V virtual machine off the network (legacy network card as the boot device) then load the OS. The only problem is that in order to get it to boot I need to hit shift + o during the ESXi boot startup, and enter the following line:
ignoreHeadless=TRUE
The problem is that I can't do this manually every time. To understand how to fix this, I first needed to understand what exactly "ignoreHeadless=TRUE" was doing. My understanding is that this has to do with the display, specifically:
"Some systems which have a video display device can be configured to report themselves as headless via the configuration, usually in the system BIOS."
I believe this is my issue, by default a Windows Hyper-V virtual machine reports itself as headless, therefore you need to ignore this configuration on startup or ESXi thinks there is a display error.
My question is, can I fix this from the virtual machine side? Can I modify the virtual machine so that it does NOT report itself as headless?