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I am having trouble using multiple Deploystudio servers on a single local network. I am trying to image machines as fast as possible, and my images are 250GB+.

I typically image 10 machines at a time, and I recently experimented with a configuration of 10 Mac Minis (2012, i7, 2.3GHz) as DS servers pushing images to 10 Macbook Pros (2011, i5, 2.4GHz), all connected to a single 24-port gigabit switch. I am using OS 10.11.3 and DS 1.7.1 for the servers.

I have a single numbered netboot image for each server. I can use 3 or 4 Mac Mini servers simultaneously without much issue, but when I have more than 4 servers connected at the same time, I start to have a problem where I can only see 1 or 2 netboot images when I option-boot.

About 50% of the client machines actually don't see any netboot images at all, and if they do, they tend to fail to connect to the server when I select the NBI.

I made sure all the NBIs have unique identifiers, all the servers have unique host names, .local names, fixed IP addresses, etc. I realize this configuration is a little unusual, but I don't see any reason why it would be impossible. Does anyone have any insight into what could be causing this issue?

donJohnson
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Ouch 250gb+ images ; that is very big. Try to downsize. Is your issue to netboot while other server client combo's are deploying? Than i guess the network is overloaded. When I have to image 10 nacs with images of 40 gb i have 1 ds server, netboot all clients, wait untill all clients are ready and start workflow almost simultanous. No multicast but the server will use its afp cache to fill the network 125 MB/s . Why so many servers? The network will be the bottleneck. Better use thunderbilt imaging like filewave lightning for 1-1 deployment. And 1 more tip: the deploystudio forum is the best place to post

Maurits
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  • Thanks for the reply, I posted the same question on the deploystudio forum under the debug section, but haven't gotten any responses yet. I had a chance to play with my setup some more today, and I managed to get it working after much frustration. – donJohnson Apr 05 '16 at 03:23
  • I think my main issue was my router was flaking out, and not serving DHCP reliably. I turned off DHCP on the router, turned ON DHCP on one of my servers, and I noticed that all my servers had Open Directory turned on, so I turned that off as well. Also, I created all new netboot images with indexes above 4096, which denotes redundant netboot sets apparently. Not sure exactly how that works, any information about that would be appreciated. So everything seems to be working now. I'm maxing out at close to 600MB/s if you add up all 10 machines. – donJohnson Apr 05 '16 at 03:35