disk io isn't an issue, the slowest drive will be a 1.5tb 7200.11
Heh, I wouldn't agree with you. Maybe if your only running 1 machine of your SAN that 1 disk is fine...
Otherwise 1 disk is not enough disk IO unless you really don't care that your disk subsystem's performance is only 25 to 75% of what it was. Sequential disk means almost nothing with you plan to network boot desktops (since you used plural) there. TCP/IP overhead combined with disk seek latency is where it is at.
If you plan to put Internet on this same Ethernet port your in for a rude awakening.
Maybe an i3 underclocked enough to run fanless?I would expect... Either A) a rather current cpu, as a one of the Core processors
It'll be one machine per disk in the SAN (going to just migrate the existing machines' drives over to the san). I'm hoping to avoid layer 3/4 overhead by using ATAoE, but we'll see.
Really? My internet is only 12 megabits and the network is all-gigabit. Is it just a bandwidth issue or is something else in play as to why I shouldn't have SAN and internet on the same NIC?
Maybe an i3 underclocked enough to run fanless?
Ancillary question to this: Does anyone know of a router that will let me run jumbo frames on my LAN and re-encapsulate them at layer 3/4 so anything going out to the internet has a 1500MTU?
What software are you running on the SAN host?
BTW, I'd love to know how you're gonna get WinXP/WinVista/Win7 to boot with gPXE/etc., without an iSCSI boot ROM. Could you write a HOWTO or something? I desperately want to get rid of hard drives here and would love to use a similar sort of solution instead of clunky and unmanaged/unRAID'ed disks.
check out the new hp thin clients - they don't use pxe boot but they are thick clients - the server delivers the o/s over lan using something (new?).
ATAOE works really with decent switches hp procurve or nicer. iscsi is actually far far far more forgiving with using cheap switches (or no switches!).