deploy slow

[alexamore90]

Hi, I hope someone can give me clarifications and advice on this:

Our work consists in installing as many PCs as possible with Win 10 in the fastest possible way, in order to be able to fulfill as many orders as possible.
Fortunately we rely on Fog server
We have an EXSI server with 3 Fog WMs called FOG 1 FOG 2 FOG 3
these 3 WMs are connected to 3 switches (10/100/1000) to which the LAN cables (cat 6) of 3 groups of workstations for the PC tariff are connected.
By deploying an image of a 22gb image on a single pc (with ssd) the maximum speed is 16/17gbs (so he indicated to me while he was deploying)

My question is: having only one pc connected in this case, is it possible that it goes at that speed? if the cables are cat 6 and the switches support up to 1gbs ? shouldn’t it exploit in this case with a single pc the whole 1gbs ?

Thank you

[george1421]

@alexamore90

Our work consists in installing as many PCs as possible with Win 10 in the fastest possible way, in order to be able to fulfill as many orders as possible.

What does this mean? How many computers do you need to image per hour to make your rate. Fast as possible is not really a measurement in time.

If I had to isolate your clarification I would say you have a unit of measure conflict. So lets start with some theoretical maximums.

1GbE == 1Gb/s == 125MB/s == 7,5GB/min The number that is displayed during the partclone part of imaging is typically in GB per minute (on a well designed 1GbE network)
Note that 1Gb/s does not equal 1GB/s, its a little confusing but Gigabit is not the same as a GigaByte.

On a well designed network with a single unicast image, using a current (<5 year old) target computer I would expect you to see in the 6-6,5GB/min throughput. At this rate a 25GB target computer image should take about 4 minutes to deploy to a target computer (single unicast image).

At 6GB/min (or 100MB/s) you are almost at the theoretical maximum for a 1GbE link of 125MB/s). Meaning: you will saturate a 1GbE link if you try to image with more than 2 unicast images at the same time. Hint that 1GbE link to your fog server will get saturated first having the greatest impact on imaging speed.

the maximum speed is 16/17gbs (so he indicated to me while he was deploying)

I can understand this speed if this is 16GB/min. I’ve seen these speeds on a large VM Host server that has one or more 10GbE links to your core network using current target computers. If you want to go faster, use 10GbE networking.

You need to understand that the number displayed on the partclone screen is a composite number made of individual measurements. The number displayed in partclone includes the speed the FOG server can get the disk image from disk to the fog server’s network adapter, network transmission time, the amount of time it takes the target computer to receive the image and load it into memory, the target computer to expand the image in memory and then to write it to disk. Your target computer performance will have the largest impact on imaging time. If you have 2 computers that are exactly the same except one has a nvme drive for storage and one has a rotating disk drive for storage you will get two vastly different imaging rates because of the speed differences between the two storage medias.

If you want to image fast, have a fog server that has ssd or nvme storage, use a 10GbE core network with enterprise class switches, use multiple network links from your fog server to your network core in a lacp/lag configuration if you want to deploy multiple unicast images at one time, use current target computer hardware, consider looking into multicast imaging.

[Sebastian Roth]

@alexamore90 Definitely look into using multicast if you want to image many in little time!!