DRBL vs FAI (Fully Automatic Installation)

DRBL deploys GNU/Linux from one server to many client machines. Clients can boot through PXE or etherboot in a diskless or systemless environment, so GNU/Linux need not be installed on each client drive. DRBL says clients can use distributed hardware resources while retaining full local-hardware access, and that other installed systems such as Windows remain untouched. Clonezilla is included for partitioning and disk cloning. Commands can change boot modes, copy files, manage user accounts and issue instructions across clients. DRBL uses PXE/etherboot, NFS and NIS for network services and supports network and multicast deployment. The free, open-source software is intended for Linux and self-hosted setups. Its installation guide supports Debian Bullseye and Buster, Ubuntu Jammy and Focal, CentOS 7, Scientific Linux 7.x and RHEL 7.x; other distributions or versions will not work. DRBL Live is available for CD/DVD or USB and hard drives in amd64, i686-pae and i686 formats.

FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) automates unattended deployment and configuration of Linux systems and software on physical computers and virtual machines. It is free software under GNU GPL version 2 or later and can scale from a few computers to several thousand. The project lists Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Linux Mint, RHEL, and SUSE among supported distributions. Installations can use PXE network boot or unattended CD media, retrieving configuration through HTTP, NFS, SVN, or Git. Classes group similar machines, while hooks customize installation stages. FAI can partition disks, create file systems, and configure software RAID or LVM. It automates virtual-machine installation and customized cloud images for OpenStack, KVM, Azure, EC2, and GCE. FAI.me builds custom installation or live media and bootable disk images without local FAI installation, with settings for SSH keys, repositories, packages, scripts, and first-boot actions. Targets include desktops, servers, notebooks, clusters, server farms, and Linux labs or classrooms. The default large CD image includes full Debian XFCE and GNOME packages but fetches many other distribution packages over the network.