Hi,

I need some technical advice regarding the technical possibilities of building a NAS for a server environment. My goal is to build a NAS , which will act as a storage for two disk-less dom0 xenservers, which run multiple virtual servers. The servers would boot on nfs from the NAS. The file system type on the NAS would be zfs. The NAS server would run on CentOS.

I searched a lot about this topic of booting servers from network, and a friend of mine told me it s possible to boot from nfs, in a disk less environment, but i m trying to figure it out the implementation on my own, without success.

My question is, is it possible to do this? Is this a safe method if i don t have the possibility of acquiring a SAN on ISCI? If it is, any guidance would be appreciated.

I would strongly suggest that you store the OS for the xenservers on the physical machines.
While I'm sure a netboot would be possible consider that you're adding a level of complexity that's simply not needed.
The on-server storage to boot the OS isn't particularly large.
For example with Citrix XenServer the whole thing fits in under 16Gb, which is well within the realms of running the OS on a USB key.
Indeed in terms of hardware the current (and I believe previous) generations of HP DL servers have a USB port (and an SD card slot!) presented inside the chassis on the motherboard for exactly this situation.

So yes, what you want to do is feasible/possible, but consider whether this is the easiest to maintain going forward.
If you can't find a lot of documentation on how to do something it generally means not a lot of people are doing it.
If not a lot of people are doing it, then they aren't doing it for a reason

Good luck and keep us up to date with how you proceed.

Dear TenTenths

I think i expressed myself incorrectly regarding the disk less environment. Indeed i know about the boot from USB option, and that's what i intend to do for the dom0. The virtual servers would boot from nfs, that s my final goal, and in the same time my problem as well on the NAS part, that s where i would request some articles.

Thanks,
Steve

Whwn you mean "boot from nfs" do you actually mean that or do you mean you wish to store the virtual disks for the machines on nfs?

Well i want to store the virtual hard drive on the nfs storage, which will contain the domU. I'm new to this kind of centralized data environment, so please correct me if that s not possible. The idea is to get rid of DAS servers, and move the virtualized server onto one storage.

Have you looked at Apache Cloudstack to manage your virtual servers, images, network maps and disk connection to help you spin up a VM.
It may be overkill for what you want but...
It will manage all of the bits and pieces required to start a VM on a diskless host and give you a good UI for managing it.

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Thank you for your input. I ll have a look into it, never worked with it before.