Re: [Users] Pxeboot

-----Original Message----- From: Perry Myers [mailto:pmyers@redhat.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 2:54 PM To: Mike Burns Cc: Li, David; users(a)ovirt.org Subject: Re: [Users] Pxeboot On 02/08/2012 05:03 PM, Mike Burns wrote: > On Wed, 2012-02-08 at 13:46 -0800, Li, David wrote: >> Mike, >> >> If I understand this correctly, today I should be able to pxeboot and >> nfs mount the root fs from a remote server. Apart from setting up >> the pxe stuff, I 'd have to populate the ovirt node root fs on the >> server >> - perhaps steal it from a disk install. In other words I am >> concerned about the point from which the kernel starts to execute >> /init script (in the initramfs) to the point /init is able to mount >> the final root fs from a remote server. > > No, there is no way to set this up currently in ovirt-node. You could > install using a remote iscsi lun if you have a hardware iscsi HBA, but > there isn't a way to mount a remote nfs share as the root fs. > > Supporting a remote NFS share as the root fs isn't even something that > requested as an RFE at this point or on the roadmap as far as I'm > aware. > > It sounds like what you're really looking for is a shared root fs that > multiple hosts could use. This is something that we will probably > look into eventually, but it's not on the immediate roadmap. Given that the rootfs of oVirt Node is fairly small and in a truly stateless environment would just run out of system RAM, there's no real reason to try to do a shared NFS based rootfs. It's an unnecessary complication I think, if the end goal is to move to truly stateless. For larger systems where the rootfs is on the order of GB's, shared root may make more sense.