Diskless/PXE boot?

[Stewge]

Wondering if there has been any change or updates on booting/installing PVE on a disk-less system through iSCSI or PXE? There is a wiki article but it's not very efficient for mass deployment.

I'm looking at moving to a much bigger production cluster design with remote (NAS/SAN) storage based on the new SuperMicro MicroBlade chassis.
Link:http://www.supermicro.com.tw/products/MicroBlade/enclosure/

In particular, we're looking at the Avoton based blades which have 4 discrete nodes per blade. Problem is, the embedded hard drive locations are non-swappable (ie. you have to pull the entire blade in event of drive failure, which means taking 4 nodes offline).
However, if PVE could be booted competely remotely via iSCSI or PXE then the need to ever pull blades due to failure is reduced enormously (literally no moving parts left on the blades).

I'll have a similar stand-alone Avoton board available for me to test in the coming weeks, but looking to see if anybody else has had related experiences.

 

[MACscr]

What did you end up doing?

 

[jvoriz]

Hi ! I'm a little late but i've managed to PXE boot current PVE (6.3) using the Debian live-build tools. With additional scripts it is possible at boot time to live configure network interfaces and bridges, define remote / ramdisk storage and even restore / start VMs / CTs.

So my homelab servers do not need any local disks (but maximum RAM possible) and everything is running from RAM and is very fast.

Running / creating cluster is also easy using the web interface.

With few modifications (not tested) it is also possible to boot a "live" PVE from a local storage (USB / SDcard) needed to just store kernel, initrd and rootfs, but i prefer a small ARM node on network to serve boot files.

I could publish these scripts on a git repo if someone need them to build his own "live pve".

 

[thomas-hn]

I could publish these scripts on a git repo if someone need them to build his own "live pve".

It would be very helpful if you could provide what you exactly did.

 

[abbott]

I could publish these scripts on a git repo if someone need them to build his own "live pve".

Nice! I'm also interested in the scripts if you have moment to share a repo.