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As i'm at a point of increasing my actual 4 server count, how should I handle storing the OS of each server?

Problem: I have no money and I'm looking for a way to buy more servers without buying and taking care of new boot ssds.

The actual setup is that each server has their own 120/240gb ssd to boot from, and one of my servers is a NAS.

at first I thought of PXE persistent boot, but how would I assign each machine their own image is one of the problems..

I've found this post talking about Disk-less persistent PXE, but it's 5 years old, it talks about SAN booting, but most people I've seen in this sub are against fiber-channel protocol, probably there's a better way?

Without mentioning speed requirements (like a full-flash NAS or 10+gbit), Is it possible to add more servers, without purchasing a dedicated boot device for each one?

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What drives do you all use for NAS?
  • Whatever is CMR and good enough. WD red, Ironwolf, etc

    I've got a lot of random hdds, highest capacity are 4TBs ones, all in ceph nodes

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  • Hello, i'm very tight on money, i'm looking to expand my homelab

    Use case is virtualization for productivity/gaming/AI workloads

    I've been looking at a few xeon v4 cpus, like the 2660 v4 or the 2680 v4, both should work fine for 2-4 VMs running off it. Some servers for example are the Dell R730 which could fit 2 GPUs or preferably custom boards with the X99 chipsets.

    Prices available in my region for a (used) Dell r730 machine range between 900-1000$, including 64gb ram and dual Xeon 2603/2620 v4 cpus, while a consumer system with (used parts) i7 10900k (or the AMD equivalent) and 64gb ram costs 500-800$

    Are these xeon machines worth buying long-term (4-5 years)? I've been also looking at consumer options, but I'm not sure of the main differences between both consumer vs enterprise machines

    "EPYC"-based machines are not available in my location, neither ebay/amazon, so i'm very limited in options, what should I pick? A Xeon v4 machine or a AMD/Intel consumer system?

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