Designing a Rack with no local storage on edge servers

Hi all,

Long time lurker and peruser of L1T!

I wanted to pick the communities brains today to see whether anyone has been through the same issue I find myself in.

I’ve been tasked with designing a single rack whereby edge servers where virtualisation and compute have no local storage. Instead, the expectation utilises a tool such as PXE, which I have used while testing MaaS.io from Canonical. However, their implementation for deploying workloads to the edge server still requires local storage.

I’m hoping there will be some magical solution to my issues, and whilst designing it from a hardware perspective isn’t an issue (2x 10Gb NIC on all edge servers into 2x MoR switches and an NVMe accelerated SSD / HDD hybrid storage cluster using Ceph or a similar tool.

Has anyone come across a situation like this? What was their outcome?

Many thanks!

EDIT: Reading through Openstacks documentation regarding their implementation of PXE (Boot interfaces — ironic 18.3.0.dev17 documentation) and it looks like this may be the solution to my problems.

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Iscsi an option?

ISCSI is an option, just concerned how it may impact latency as the design scales. I did look at fibre channels but because their design ratios max out at 20:1, they scale even worse than ISCSI.

There are a number of customers of ours that do use ironic to pxe bootstrap diskless compute. Ironic is one of those capabilities in openstack that doesn’t get enough attention as it allows you to stand up/tear down physical metal on-demand like you would a vm (including housekeeping like configuring the raid controller / scrubbing the disks).

Is this openstack? if so I would recommend looking at openstack DCN architecture /storage for edge it might help.

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Just looked into Redhats Openstack Platform, might have to make that migration! The implementation is very clean.

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