Good simple guide to boot and root from/on lan?

[Stanza]

OK here's the deal

I have multiple Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Debian etc Servers that I play with at home.

And I want to simplify my life A LOT

Always known about it, sometimes had a fiddle to get it going... but usually ran out of time or changed systems around... so never actually managed to get it all working.

So I have an Xpenology box thats always turned on..but really all it does is hold movies and tv series for the other half... it can to TFTP / NFS etc and I had it setup one for installing OS's (ESXi, Ubuntu etc)

I am planing to make most of my gear diskless now... so might as well set it up properly once and for all
So does anyone have a good guide / notes etc on how to get it setup?

I realise that I can have one image for several of the same hardware machines.....so that will simplify some of it.

Here is what I would like in the end

Xpenology box will hold VM's and Boot/Root images and file systems, then I can fire up machines as I see fit but have all data in one place.

Backups are in place to a second Xpenology box so thats taken care of

Both Xpenology box (always on and backup boxes) have
AMD A4-4000
4Gb Ram
8 x 2TB drives
1 x Gigabit onboard ( 10.0.0.x ) and servers the general household data
2 x 10GB Emulex HBA's (192.168.2.x and 192.168.3.x) Storage and VM Networks

DNS and DHCP can be managed from the always on Box
So I am sort of set there

Anyone care to share there notes on how you got it going. (google is just a mash of miss information and or outdated guides.

Failing that maybe we can get our heads together to make something simple for others to base their own setups off of?

Here is hoping

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[Stanza]

Actually, just thinking about this some more.

Guess I will have to change the network a little.
I am going to need at least 2 x gigabit lan ports (one for normal household stuff, and one for netbooting) as not all servers will have 10gbe ports.

So I will end up with
1 x GB Lan Internal
1 x Gb Lan, Netboot, DNS, DHCP etc
10Gb Storage / Backup
10Gb VM's

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[Marsh]

Let me describe my LAB stack infracture
3 Dell C6100, 1 Intel H2312 with 4 nodes ( Dual E5-26xx ), all compute nodes are diskless.
2 x HP ( dual x5650 ) with lots of disks.
Multiple HP Microservers running Xpenology to serve the lab stack.
2 x Windows 2012R2 server as hyper-v hosts to hosts DNS, stuff.
One key VM for this discussion is a Xpenology VM on SSD function as iSCSI and NFS boot images server.

Why visualized Xpenology VM as boot image server on hyper-v ?

Backup the Xpenology VM, is just as easy as copying the vhd file to a backup server. No mess with backup software.
Ability to take snapshoot of the entire Xpenology VM
I like how easy for web gui to assign iSCSI Lun to iSCSI target.
Xpenology iSCSI lets me clone and take snapshoot of iSCI lun with a mouse click. I could experimented with different OS.
Xpenology as nfs server works well.
The entire VM could reside on SSD

P.S my home setup is not necessary better, it is entirely based on Ebay bargain price, and easy on my old age memory.

More writeup later on next post.