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?
What OS are you running? If the main storage is on the network, chances are the OS can run from anywhere.
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)