Booting to a default NetBoot set with VMWare Fusion’s Technology Preview

As a follow-up to the previous post, the NetBoot support built into VMWare Fusion’s June 2012 Technology Preview also supports easily booting to a default NetBoot set.

To boot to a default NetBoot set, hold down the N key on your keyboard when the VM starts up. Just like a physical Mac, the VM should then look for and boot from the default NetBoot set.

An added feature for VMWare Fusion’s NetBoot support is that VMs will automatically try to boot from a default NetBoot set if the VM can’t find a boot OS otherwise. I was able to verify this by setting up a new and completely unconfigured VM, where there was no OS install disk or disk image selected to boot from. (To make sure it was able to see the NetBoot set, I did change the Network Adapter settings to Ethernet Sharing: Ethernet.)

The VM started and found no OS on the VM’s boot disk or elsewhere. It then booted to my network’s default NetBoot set without any intervention on my part.