In case anyone is interested I've had success netbooting (via PXE) RLX blades running FreeBSD 4.x off of a read-only mount on a Netapp filer. I removed all the local storage on the blades and all I have to do to swap out a blade (with no moving parts) is to update the MAC address on the DHCP server.

Instructions are in the FreeBSD handbook:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.h...

Thanks, Adi

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003 12:27:56 -0500, "Bui, Marcus" Marcus.Bui@aiminvestments.com said: A few items to clarify:   - The environment have both Filers (F880c, F820) and SAN (Sun,HDS).  Filers running CIFS only. - All HP blade servers are Windows client. - Have not implemented or tested iSCSI.  Probably not any time soon. - The blade servers will have mirrored drives, probably 36GB drives, with 9GB partition for OS.  The rest can be Data to fully utilize the drive. - Most of the application residing on these servers are not disk I/O intensive.   cheers, Marcus

-----Original Message----- From: Bui, Marcus

[mailto:Marcus.Bui@aiminvestments.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2003 11:11 AM To: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: blade servers to Filer

Hi Toasters,   We are migrating many of the current servers to

HP blade servers.  The Server Team is considering connecting to the Filers/SAN on the back end for storage.  I know this is not a problem.  Some of the applications servers only need 4GB of space so leaving it on the DAS will be better.  Want to best utilize the Filers since not every blade server is a good candidate for NAS if DAS will suffice.  What are some criteria to use when considering connecting blade servers to the Filers?  Any suggestion is appreciated.   cheers,

Marcus Bui