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Boot Win7/Linux without disk via ZFS, iSCSI

B

brutalizer

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 23, 2010
Messages
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Here is an interesting blog, about setting up iSCSI with OpenSolaris and ZFS. This allows you to boot a PC over the network without using any disks, i.e. diskless client. Thus, you can have several different OSes installed, and choose from which you want to boot. You can clone the OS and deploy several PCs in a matter of minutes. Very interesting read.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=41
 
Very interesting, but not exactly very straight forward. The concept is very old, and has been used for a long time, but it's always been complicated, requiring many steps and often resulting in mediocre performance at best.

I would love to do this for an HTPC though, but I would like to see some performance numbers and hear the writers subjective oppinion of the performance.
 
I did this on my HTPC. Well, first I experimented around with PXE booting an image, and while I got it working it isn't something I really want to do again - it required quite a bit of infrastructure, configuration, firmware flashing of etc. Maybe worthwile if you have quite a few boxes to amortize the setup cost, but with just one computer not worth it imo.

Then I picked up a Broadcom network card (5709 I think, have to check though) off of ebay for 40 bucks which can also act as an iSCSI HBA. This is definitely the way to go if you want to netboot via iSCSI. I simply put in the IQN, etc. into the network card bios and it pretty much worked transparently.

That said with small SSD's coming down to 60-80 bucks new that's probably what I would end up going with just for simplicity (for a HTPC anyway). If you have some sort of infrastructure where being able to quickly boot up multiple images, snapshot existing images quickly and easily, etc. was of value then the iSCSI boot might pull ahead.
 
I do this at home although it is off of a Linux server. I use gPXE and dhcp server to get 3 clients network booting off of one SSD on the server. Good way to increase the performance without buying so many SSDs.
 
@randomcoww

what sort of speeds are you getting? What about latencies? What about the bootup? I'd imagine there's be a noticable performance deficit compared to running on dedicated hardware, but how does my imagination compare to reality? :)
 
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