Trouble scaling up standalone cluster – new nodes stuck on PXE boot

[max18557]

Hello, I am testing EKS Anywhere as a potential container orchestration platform and I'm at the stage where i'm trying to understand maintenance operations like scaling up and performing updates. However, I'm struggling to scale up my standalone cluster. When I attempt to add a worker node, the new VM hangs on PXE boot and never proceeds into HookOS. I suspect I'm misunderstanding the scaling process, or doing something incorrectly.

Expected Behavior

The new node should successfully PXE boot, load HookOS, write the OS image and join the cluster as a worker node. Actual Behavior The node repeatedly hangs at PXE boot. It never transitions into HookOS. After each failed attempt, the cluster is left in a degraded state expecting the missing worker node to join.

Steps to Reproduce:

Create a standalone cluster (1 control plane, 1 worker). Verify new hardware is visible via: $kubectl get hardware -n eksa-system --show-labels (the extra node shows up here).

Update the cluster spec to set the worker node count from 1 → 2. Run the cluster upgrade command from the admin machine. Power on the new VM and set it to PXE boot. Restart the VM every couple of minutes while watching PXE attempts.

Questions

Am I following the correct procedure to scale up a standalone cluster? What is the recommended way to recover a cluster after a failed scale-up attempt, without recreating it from scratch or restoring from backup?

Environment

eksctl version: 0.214.0 kubectl version: v1.34.0 eksctl anywhere version: v0.23.2 Kubernetes version: v1.31.11-eks-7b6cd08 Node OS: Rocky Linux 9 Admin machine OS: Ubuntu 22.04 Infrastructure: VMs (bare metal install flow – unsupported hypervisor)

Network: Proxy allows access to all documented EKS-A URLs /24 subnet No internet access No DHCP server

Thank you for you time :)