How should I handle OS storage without disks? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by JoaGamo@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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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?

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[-] geek_at@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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

this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023

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