[Users] Pxeboot

[Perry Myers]

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.