Bootable virtual media from HTTP

[anatoly-savchenkov]

It would be very useful if ESP-KVM could mount bootable virtual media directly from an HTTP/HTTPS URL.

Instead of uploading an ISO to ESP-KVM first, the KVM could be given a URL to an image hosted on a local web server and expose it to the target as virtual CD/DVD media.

Typical use case: keep installation and recovery ISOs on a NAS or deployment server, select an image by URL in ESP-KVM, reboot the target, and install or recover the system remotely.

This would make virtual media much more practical for repeated deployments and for managing multiple machines, while avoiding unnecessary image uploads and local storage on the KVM itself.

[dexif]

Streaming the ISO straight from a URL would work but be very slow and fragile - every block read becomes a network request, and a network hiccup kills the installer.

But I’ll add the option to download the image directly to the microSD card via the UI. Basically, everything is already set up for that.

[anatoly-savchenkov]

Downloading directly to the microSD card would definitely be useful, but I think URL-backed virtual media is still a different and valuable use case. It may be worth looking at how BMCs / nbdkit implement streaming virtual media. I believe an implementation could use HTTP Range + chunk cache/read-ahead + retry, optionally with microSD as a progressive cache (although not sure about that). Target use-case is a local HTTP server with ISO images. Similar functionality works nicely in HPE iLo BMC in my environment.