Network installs

geuben

geuben

geuben

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Joined
23 Mar 2006
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Hi,

Can anyone provide or point me in the direction of some information on network installing linux? In particular I need to know how to configure the PXE boot server to copy hdd images on to the local hard drive on boot.

I've currently got a PXE boot system that loads the OS into an initial ram disk and boots from there (so no hdd needed). However this is not suitable for some of the systems we wish to use.

My googling skills are failing me today, I keep getting loads of results for kickstart script install which I don't want to do.

Thanks.
 
Hey, sorry completely forgot I made this thread.

As suggested we are looking to "refresh" each system on reboot, this will give us a known state for all our development/test systems on each boot.

The reason we don't want to go down the kickstart install route is speed as copying an image 'should' be quicker.

We currently have a diskless boot system setup that loads user selectable versions of CentOS into a ramdisk, this if fine for 64bit systems but 32bit systems have a initial ramdisk limit of ~850mb (part of the i386 boot protocol), this isn't big enough to copy the compressed file system into and uncompress. Hence why we are looking to use a hard drive for systems requiring 32-bit OS's.
 
York said:
Have you looked into something like Citrix Provisioning Server? That would be able to do what you want. Rather than imaging on each boot it just streams the image to the machine. On a reboot you can reset it back to the golden image, wiping the cache.

We use Citrix PVS for all of our XenDesktop VDI images. All VDI gets streamed from 1 golden image. At a reboot it's reset to that image :)
Click to expand...

That looks pretty nice. I bet it's not cheap though, might also require a bit too much managing that we're after.
 
VMWare is no good to us as we need to be running directly on the hardware with nothing in between and no changes to the kernel. We need performance to be as similar to running on a normal hdd install systme as possible.
 
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