Blades are becoming an increasingly popular method for companies to use to build up their infrastructure at a low cost. Blades provide a large computing powerhouse in an extremely small, condensed footprint. Using Linux as the operating system of choice and booting “diskless” provides for even lower cost of ownership, faster build times, and easier maintenance cycles.

This Redpaper describes the experience of configuring the IBM Diskless Image Management (DIM) Server and a cluster of System p-based JS21 blades to remotely boot from the DIM Server (diskless boot). The paper gives examples that explain and demonstrate how you can build a similar cluster.