I was trying to PXE boot a guest for quite some time now and I think I’ve found a solution that is kind of hackish but pretty simple. I’m not quite sure it’s good to go in trunk but felt like I’d share it since I’ve been messing a while on this. If anybody have a better solution, I would really like to hear/see/try it …

Here is how I did it:

First, patch the libvirt/driver.py file:

 --- /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/nova/virt/libvirt/driver.py.orig 2013-05-10 16:25:17.787862177 +0000
 +++ /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/nova/virt/libvirt/driver.py 2013-05-10 16:26:39.442022870 +0000
 @@ -87,6 +87,9 @@
 LOG = logging.getLogger(__name__)

libvirt_opts = [
 + cfg.StrOpt('default_guest_boot_dev',
 + default='hd',
 + help='Sets the default guest boot device'),
      cfg.StrOpt('rescue_image_id',
                 default=None,
                 help='Rescue ami image'),
 @@ -1792,7 +1795,7 @@
                                                     instance['name'],
                                                     "ramdisk")
              else:
 - guest.os_boot_dev = "hd"
 + guest.os_boot_dev = FLAGS.default_guest_boot_dev

         if FLAGS.libvirt_type != "lxc" and FLAGS.libvirt_type != "uml":
              guest.acpi = True

And add to nova.conf:

 default_guest_boot_dev=network

And finally add to /etc/dnsmasq.conf

 dhcp-boot=boot\x86\pxelinux.com,host_name,host_ip
 dhcp-no-override

And restart dnsmasq.conf

In my actual setup, the guest will PXE boot, show the menu 60 seconds and then boot from hard disk after the 60 seconds timeout.