Disaster Recovery: PXE boot Windows Server 2019 from ISO

I have a dedicated physical Windows Server 2019 on the Ionos cloud platform. I need to implement a disaster recovery plan. I also have added a shared storage block on another Ionos server and mapped the shared storage segment as a network drive on the dedicated server. I created a bootable media ISO file and a bare metal backup file, and saved both of these to a folder on the shared storage segment. The shared storage segment is assignable to multiple servers, so in case of disaster I would have access to the ISO file and bare metal backup from the new server. Ionos will not provide the service of inserting a USB drive in a new server in order to boot from it, and the server does not permit iLO nor iDRAC IPMI access. I am looking for a way to remotely boot from the ISO boot media and then have access to the ISO-booted server in order to do the next step of restoring the bare metal backup file to the new server. Is there any way to do this?

Solution 1:

If the iso contains a Windows pe environment, then you can start that using iPXE and Wimboot. To access the rest of the iso contents you need to do a separate mount when inside winpe.

Another alternative is to make the iso available over iSCSI and again use iPXE to boot that iSCSI device. This requires that the OS on the ISO is iSCSI + BFT aware, and that it has drivers for the NIC.

Even if you could load the iso into memory during PXE stage, access to that data becomes unavailable unless the OS itself knows how to access that data.