Last week emBoot quietly released the final winBoot/i, a product that was first announced last Spring at SNW. A copy of the release is here.The product was delayed waiting for Microsoft to release the required iSCSI software initiator version tells me Mickey McIntire, former CEO of String Bean Software (remember Wintarget?) a company that was recently acquired by Microsoft. What has McIntire to do with emBoot? With more time on my hands I’ve started getting back into the consulting business with my first client being emBoot, Inc. he explains. I couldn’t resist downloading an eval copy of winBoot/i and you should do the same if you have iSCSI storage in a Windows environment.How does it work? You install the winBoot/i server on one of your machines, typically where your DHCP server is. Then allocate some boot image volumes from your iSCSI target, usually one for each Windows server you want to protect. Moving to the candidate servers ,install the client version of winBoot/i which will install also the boot capable version of the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. As last touch, using the iSCSI initiator at each server grab the correspondent boot image volume created before.Now you’re ready to make a copy of the boot disk of each server to its iSCSI volume. Appropriately, emBoot gives you a choice to use the installed winBoot/i client or to boot from the installation CD and save the pain of managing those open files.This is what you should see when booting from the CD to make a copy View image. That’s it, set your servers to boot from the NIC and you should be ready for diskless servers. I am still testing, so don’t have reached a final opinion yet, but I like what I’ve seen so far.However, it helps to have at least GbE on each machine even better 10GbE, if you can squeeze that in your budget. We have found the vast majority of GbE NICs in use are Broadcom or Intel. Broadcom NICs, we have found on many occasions, need the very latest in PXE and NDIS code to avoid freezes on startup to Windows iSCSI boot. We’ve injected their very latest drivers into the Windows PE-based Client Deployment Tool [bootable CD or PXE image]. tells me Steve Marfisi, Manager of Technical Services for emBoot. Of course, every environment has its own potential bumps in the road, which is why the free trial offered by emBoot makes much sense. We’ve also added support for Neterion Xframe 10 GbE NICs and Alacritech iSCSI NICs, as well as VMware NIC drivers Marfisi explains. The client license for winBoot/i is $95 for each machine. The license for the first winBoot/i server is free, but you’ll pay $395 each if you need additional servers. It’s tempting to say that you could cover the cost of deploying winBoot/i with the cost of the drives spared on each server. However, I won’t say that because the main reason to boot your servers from iSCSI volumes should not be to save money on drives, but to give your data center a more manageable and forward looking structure.Isn’t it about time for your OS volumes to become part of a SAN? I think it is and winBoot/i gives you the tools to do exactly that. Very high on my “check this out” meter.