Video Suggestion: install OS to iSCSI

I recently read on t h e i n t e r n e t (so it must be true) that you can install and boot most OSes from an iSCSI drive. If that storage is backed by FreeNAS on a 10Gb network, that opens up the possibility that you can snapshot and rollback the disk of a physical machine with storage faster than a lot of SSDs. Rad. Well, rad assuming the FreeNAS rig can handle the extra resulting CPU load on it.

I suspect this is too good to be true, though. I imagine that there needs to be at least some local storage to at least get the NIC up, but I also don’t fully grok how iSCSI works under the hood. Regardless, it might be a cool trick to be able to roll back a whole physical machine to a time before $bad_thing happened to it.

Give me a heads-up if you’re not going to run with this idea. I’ve got a homelab I can test this out on, but I’m in the process of moving to a larger server rack and upgrading to 10Gb NICs and I probably won’t get that done for another month yet.

It is possible as long as you have a card/computer/bios that supports it. It is not very practical though

I was hoping you would consider revisiting this topic. I have iscsi targets available to three machines one at 10gb and two at 5gb. and I would love an LTS walkthrough on configuring them to pxe boot and run directly from the NAS. I am running TrueNas 12.0-RC1.

Thanks!

You need a motherboard that has the option of booting from iSCSI, I don’t think I have one or any desire to get one. But the process is simple as you go into the BIOS and attach the iSCSI as a drive for the system. Once attached, load the OS like any other.

Once I’ve got my new home office situated, I plan on making a video on this topic since youtube is a thing I pretend I do.