Live ISO over http

[espenbraastad]

I boot live OSes over the network and straight into memory all the time. It works like a charm, and memory is really cheap nowadays. I don't really see the memory issue. Consider an enterprise server where state is stored remotely (FC, iSCSI, NFS, HTTP, etc) - it is really a lot cheaper to run the entire operating system from memory and not having to shell out for the RAID controller and a couple of SAS drives just to run the operating system. The same goes for workstations in thin client environments, but easier management is the biggest win in those environments.

I use mostly EL6 from memory, and have written some blog posts about how to do it.

For Ubuntu and/or Debian, have a look at the debirf package.