Booting from USB or CD-ROM

Nodes should support booting from a USB 2.0-based flash key. For security, only use a USB key that has a physical write-protected switch (e.g., Imation Pivot Flash, TwinMOS Mobile Disk Z4, or other). However, if your system does not support USB booting or you cannot find a write-protect USB, then as a minimum it must also have a CD-ROM drive that supports bootable CDs.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

as of May 2009
good through June 2011

Nodes must meet minimum PCU, CPU, RAM, and storage requirements:

PCU	Built-in, remote-access power-reset capability, accessible from PLC, such as IntelAMT, HPiLO, DellRAC, IPMIv2, etc
CPU	4x Intel cores @ 2.4Ghz (e.g., quad core or 2x dual core)
RAM	4 GB
Disk	500 GB

At least two nodes must meet the configurations mentioned in the table above. More are better. If you do not know whether your hardware meets the minimum requirements, or whether it is supported by Linux, we strongly recommend purchasing one of the known working hardware configurations listed below: