There’s a way to provision diskless hosts?

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1

Problem: I want to provision hosts that are diskless.

Expected outcome: Be able to create an image or something similar and then boot diskless machines.

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Distribution and version:
EL 7.6

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Hello, not sure if this message is in the right place, but I want to know if Foreman supports diskless (stateless) machines.

If yes, there’s any deployment guide or instructions? I wasn’t able to find it.

2

@iballou is working on integrating project M2 which does exactly what you need. However I don’t know what is the current status. More details in RFC: Bare Metal Provisioning with M2 in Foreman

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3

@lzap I was reading the mentioned thread and I think the M2 approach does much more than needed here. Perhaps I was extremely vague on the description, but when I said diskless I wasn’t thinking in something booting from iSCSI or CEPH (like in M2), but an stateless machine, that every time it is rebooted, it just grabs an image from the server and runs it from RAM.

Some softwares implements this kind of thing, like xCAT, Warewulf and LTSP (in fat mode). It’s basically generating a “live” image.

So when I mean diskless, I truly mean stateless. Should I change the subject?

Thanks.

4

That makes sense, then describe in more detail how you would like to have Foreman integrated. What are the missing bits? This should be doable, all you need to do is to modify our PXE templates.