Juju Digest, Vol 55, Issue 18

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 25/08/15 14:20, Bruno Pereira wrote:
> Diskless is tricky using the current structure of MAAS (at least on the
> stage I last tested it around 1 year ago), its fairly simple to do, but not
> if you follow a install with a reboot in to OS, similar to kickstart
> installations, structure.
>
> For diskless you need to pxe boot a initial initrd and kernel image, load
> the same kernel as your OS image, find a way of downloading your image (bit
> torrent is an idea as much silly as it might sound, deployment of 1000's of
> servers is really hard even for very fast networks), decompress that image
> to RAM, chrooting and loading your OS system with services and all.
>
> Diskless is fancy and cool, but not required to do HPC, after all you don't
> keep deploying a cluster day after day (even running diskless the up time
> is amazing), stability is the word. 99% of the clusters you see in the
> field are with some sort of HDDs. The only one I remember have seen
> installed by my company was big 3k nodes recently, but the last one was
> more than a year ago.

PXE, initrd, iSCSI is the likely path (though RD is not inconceivable
either). BT is feasible for image distribution, yes.

Mark