Booting from remote storage [LWN.net]

Booting from remote storage

Posted Apr 7, 2017 9:19 UTC (Fri) by lmb (subscriber, #39048)
Parent article: Booting from remote storage

Boot a minimal initrd-thingy via PXE and then load the rootfs from wherever you like (iSCSI, RBD, NFS)? I must be missing something?

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Booting from remote storage

Posted Apr 7, 2017 17:54 UTC (Fri) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

I have never used FCoE or iSCSI in production for a boot volume. I have a little experience with regular FC and found it be a hassle as every once in awhile something would go wrong with no way to diagnose it. Which has pretty much been my experience with FC in general. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would use FCoE unless they are trying to bridge to a legacy SAN. PFC/ETS can be used with vanilla iSCSI without needing NIC support.

As noted in the article, PXE booting "just works" and configuration is typically pretty trivial to enable remotely via the BMC.