you may be interested in creating a NFS or GFS based diskless shared root cluster, i.e. all nodes share the same root filesystem. http://open-sharedroot.org/documentation/rhel5-gfs-shared-root-mini-howto http://open-sharedroot.org/documentation/nfs-sharedroot-mini-howto http://open-sharedroot.org/documentation/the-opensharedroot-mini-howto http://open-sharedroot.org/faq/can-i-use-yum-or-up2date-to-install-the-software Mark On Wednesday 06 February 2008 20:48:13 Jason wrote: > not exactly. what are you planning on doing with these machines? Once > they boot (which is maybe a 5 meg or so file) then the file system is > pulled from an NFS share. You can do the entire OS and file system in > RAM, but why? A server with 512meg of RAM will be MORE then enough > to serve as a PXE server (to boot off the network) and an NFS server > (for the filesystems). Smack in a 100 gig harddrive and you're golden. > > Scott Ehrlich wrote: > > I'm looking at building a small cluster of disk-less 1 or 2U servers and > > will probably use CentOS 5. > > > > Since these machines will not have any hard drives, what would be the > > minimum amount of RAM I'd need? Also, if using Rocks or something > > similar, will that help cluster the RAM together so 4 servers x 4 GB RAM > > each = 16 GB available? > > > > Some applications might be CPU intensive, others might be RAM intensive, > > so I need to play that balance, too. > > > > Thanks. > > > > Scott > > _______________________________________________ > > CentOS mailing list > > CentOS at centos.org > > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos -- Gruss / Regards, Dipl.-Ing. Mark Hlawatschek http://www.atix.de/ http://www.open-sharedroot.org/ ** ATIX Informationstechnologie und Consulting AG Einsteinstr. 10 85716 Unterschleissheim Deutschland/Germany