PXE - Diskless Booting

[Xzin]

It sometimes makes sense to boot without a hard drive. This can be done by PXE booting. The motherboard / NIC has to support it and it is not exactly common, but it allows you to manage desktop OS installs like VM images. Very flexible and robust. I don't use it to manage 10 boxes but managing 20+ as some people do here, I could see a need for something like that.

One of the better PXE solutions out there is a company called Ardence, which was acquired by Citrix.

Here is a great video of them showing off their software on around 250 some odd computers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moIuHqIc-PQ

Their software, as usual, is not cheap. It is designed for the enterprise IT setting. There are other methods out there - Red Hat has something like this built in to their kernal and there are several other vendors out there that will enable this.

[esoterik]

how does a diskless system run games though. I would imagine with a stripped down OS ran 100% out of the ram, wouldnt graphical games still suffer a bit in performance without a big chunk of ram.

in order words, the amount saved in hard drives would be replaced with greater ram costs, so the savings is really only on ease of upgrade.

[Scribbler]

I wish I could play with things like that all day.

[Sorn]

Wouldn't mind getting Gameslah's input on this, since he seems to have a good grasp of diskless wow.

[Xzin]

I *might* delve into it.... I have a few applications in mind that could benefit greatly from it.

Not sure its worth it for 10 boxing though..... especially considering I already have the drives.

[Kruiik]

Red Hat has something like this built in to their kernal and there are several other vendors out there that will enable this.

I havent found any other solution than Ardence for WinXP/Vista/W2k, but for Linux and Win98 i've found even too many.

On a side note - every linux is really easy to boot off from network. Create custom pxelinux-loader, and tell from which NFS address it can find it's root disk and you are on your way. Every decent distro has tools for this (RedHat, SuSe, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and so on..)
You can even use GRUB or Lilo to boot off from network (do multiboot setup, 1 for XP and 1 for network boot -> choose at bootup) and so on.

Ardence's unique contribution to this issue is the disk driver for XP that it can use network drive as virtual disk. That would be all i need for diskless XP that i want to build, but no other vendors seem to offer it now.
And Ardences representative in my country is... piss poor. They wont even send the prices

[Apocolyse]

So is this how one would set up a server and 5 stations for vboxing?

[Xzin]

Don't have to, no. Just allows hard drive free booting.

[webology]

HowtoForge has a good article on getting a PXE server up with DHCP, TFTP, and how to boot up various Linux versions with it. This is a good start for anyone that doesn't mind using Linux to get their feet wet. Samba comes on most Linux installs and it can be used to share files to the Windows clients.

BartPE is a program for creating a live boot CD/DVD for various versions of Windows. He used to have a Network boot disk version but it is no longer maintained (might still work though). I've tried creating a Windows XP image to boot through my CD with good results. It should be pretty straight forward to push it via Linux but I haven't devoted an afternoon or night to put all the pieces together.

An all windows setup is possible but I haven't found anything yet that wasn't overly expensive. I'll post my notes once I get everything working but I thought the more adventurous of you might benefit from the little bit that I've found so far.

[Jon3]

While it would make managing the operating system slightly easier, you could accomplish mostly the same thing (with MUCH faster swapfile times) by buying some dirt cheap $5 drives off ebay to boot the OS, and then pulling your copies of Wow over the network from a central storage system.