As i’m at a point of increasing my actual 4 server count, how should I handle storing the OS of each server?
Problem: I have no money and I’m looking for a way to buy more servers without buying and taking care of new boot ssds.
The actual setup is that each server has their own 120/240gb ssd to boot from, and one of my servers is a NAS.
at first I thought of PXE persistent boot, but how would I assign each machine their own image is one of the problems…
I’ve found this post talking about Disk-less persistent PXE, but it’s 5 years old, it talks about SAN booting, but most people I’ve seen in this sub are against fiber-channel protocol, probably there’s a better way?
Without mentioning speed requirements (like a full-flash NAS or 10+gbit), Is it possible to add more servers, without purchasing a dedicated boot device for each one?
You could use iSCSI for block storage and not SAN. Each machine would have its own LUN.
However, time/heart ache/frustration and learning curves are all worth something. Newegg has a reasonable SSD for $16 total including free shipping. I’d find a way to save up $64 bucks myself, even if it took a month or two and boot one new machine every other week.
What OS are you running? If the main storage is on the network, chances are the OS can run from anywhere.
- get a 100GB HDD from Craigslist for free or a few bucks
- any old crappy USB stick.
If you still want to go for PXE, you don’t need any fancy networking. All you need is a DHCP-Server and a TFTP server with a Kernel and an initramfs. I think DNSmasq can handle everything with a bit of configuration. Or you go for a full server provisioning tool like Cobbler or theforeman
You assign each server their own image by placing the file in the directory /var/lib/tftpboot//Kernel (something along those lines)
You can actually boot all your servers from USB into a RAM disk. From there you can use iSCSI or NFS or Samba to mount data on your servers. It’s what I do too and I have even written a guide how to set it up
You can go down to literally a usb stick or even micros card if they support it. Esxi works on an SD card with a few config tweaks.
You will need to PXE boot into a RAM disk and then use iSCSI/NFS/CEPH/etc for persistent storage.
