this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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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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[–] DWolfUK40@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

With the price of ssds what they are now for a small 100gb why bother with the additional setup and potentially failure points.

I’ve run esxi through network and even that wasn’t fun with longish boot times. I certainly wouldn’t like to run proxmox that way. These days there’s really no reason not to have “some” fast direct storage in each server even if it’s just used mainly as cache.

What you’re looking for is possible but to me the saving of $20 ish per machine just isn’t worth introducing more headaches.