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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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[–] AceBlade258@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I use NFS roots for my hypervisors, and iSCSI for the VM storage. I previously didn't have iSCSI in the mix and was just using qcow2 files on the NFS share, but that had some major performance problems when there was a lot of concurrent access to the share.

The hypervisors use iPXE to boot (mostly; one of them has gPXE on the NIC, so I didn't need to have it boot to iPXE before the NFS boot).

In the past I have also use a purely iSCSI environment with the hypervisors using iPXE to boot from iSCSI. I moved away from it because it's easier to maintain the single NFS root for all the hypervisors for updates and the like.

[–] JoaGamo@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How? Are you loading a configuration in a device plugged in each hypervisor server? Any project i should read further?

[–] AceBlade258@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

The servers use their built-in NIC's PXE to load iPXE (I still haven't yet figured out how to flash iPXE to a NIC), and then iPXE loads a boot script that boots from NFS.

Here is the most up-to-date version of the guide I used to learn how to NFS boot: https://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=CentOS_Stream_9&p=pxe&f=5 - this guide is for CentOS, so you will probably need to do a little more digging to find one for Debian (which is what Proxmox is built on).

iPXE is the another component: https://ipxe.org/

It's worth pointing out that this was a steep learning curve for me, but I found it super worth it in the end. I have a pair of redundant identical servers that act as the "core" of my homelab, and everything else stores its shit on them.