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dingalingchickenwiing
Asked: 2010-10-20 11:59:47 +0800 CST

Disk-Less Web Servers

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I recently read about a company which setup all of their linux webservers to run without hard drives. This sounded really exciting to me because that would essentially mean that the biggest point of failure (HDD) is now gone. Furtheremore, when updating the OS (or anything else) for 5 or 10 web servers would be as easy as simply editing one image.

The million dollar question is, how is this done? what is needed to make this work properly and what are the PROS/CONS? It's a great sounding idea, I just hope I am not missing some really big issues.

Thanks!

linux ubuntu web-server network-attached-storage

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    PXE and a big ramdisk.

    The good thing is that bringing up a new web server is as easy as turning it on. The bad things are that setting it up in heterogeneous environments can hard, and that each server can take a while to start up.

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  2. As well as Ignacio's PXE option you can also boot from iSCSI or FC/FCoE which will allow you to distribute your boot points if required so as not to overload a single server.

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