Figured I would start another thread so as not to lose this topic under another. I want to try to explain what it is that I need. Since I'm not an industry guy, I don't know all of the terms so apologies if I confuse anyone. What I badly need right now is a shared root style system. Perhaps where all nodes boot from the FC SAN using their HBA's and all have access to GFS storage all around the network. There are various reasons I would like to do this but one of them also includes trying to save on power. Say I took 32 machines and was able to get them all booting off the network without drives, then I could use a 12 drive FC chassis as the boot server. What I had worked on last year was partitioning one of these chassis into 32 partitions, one for each system but I think there is a better way and, maybe even gaining some benefits. The problem with that was that partitions were fixed and inaccessible as individual partitions once formatted on the storage chassis. A shared root system would be better because then I don't have to have fixed partitions, just files. Then, each node would have it's storage over other storage chassis on the network. This is what I would like to achieve, so far, without success. On another train of thought, I was wondering about the following. Would there be any benefit in creating an SSI cluster made up of x number of servers. Then, slicing that up into VM's as required. The SSI would always be intact as it is, the servers could come and go as needed, the storage would be separate from the entire mix. If one node needed more processing power than the rest, it would take it from the SSI cluster. Otherwise, idle machines are wasting their resources. Again, this is just a theory based on my tiny understanding of SSI clusters and VM to begin with but it's kind of an outline of what I'd like to achieve. The reason of course is that then I would have a very scalable environment where very little goes to waste, resources can be used where needed, not wasted. Mike -- Linux-cluster mailing list Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
