FOG speed problem

[alexamore90]

Hello, I have had a problem for a couple of days now, I have a hp dl380g7 server with exsi 6.5 and fog vm, if I put 10 pc at the same time the speed drops to like 1.3 and sometimes even less, however ’ the fact is that if I remove 5 PCs, while deploying all 10 the speed always remains the same, it does not increase.but if I start the deploy only on one pc the rate becomes 16gbs. i have checked the network card settings which comes out online and also set to both 1000 and auto-negotiate
the server setup is the exact copy of the other dell server i have and it works great.
could this be due to the server’s network card? I tried changing both switches and cables but nothing, it always does the same, but it worked fine at first. the server has no internet out, so it hasn’t even updated.

[george1421]

@alexamore90 You have painted an incomplete picture here so I can only speak in general terms.

Using modern target computers you can flood a 1GbE network link with 2-3 simultaneous unicast imaging. Any additional number of simultaneous will impact the overall performance of all systems imaging. On a well designed 1GbE network you should be able to get between 5.5 and 6.5 GB/min as displayed on the partclone screen during imaging. For a 10GbE network you should get between 13 and 15 GB/min. (your performance metrics of 16gbs and 1000 and auto-negotiate are inconsistent). If you only have a 1 GbE network, you can add additional network cards configured in a LAG trunk to spread the imaging load of 10 computers across multiple nic cards.

During imaging the heavy load is carried by the target computer. The FOG server only moves disk blocks from its local storage and sends them out the network adapter. The fog server does monitor the imaging process but does not perform heavy computational load. The speed of the disk subsystem on the FOG server will also have an impact. If your fog server only has 1 physical spinning disk, that disk will have to work hard to keep up with delivering 10 data streams from different locations on the disk platter. In this case if you only have spinning disks, setting up a striped raid configuration using multiple disks will help or moving to SSD drives.

The last comment is if you need to image 10 systems at a time, you might look into FOG multicasting mode. This mode requires some setup and a network infrastructure that supports multicasting, but with this mode you can image 30 or more systems at the same network bandwidth as just 2 multicast streams.

[DBCountMan]

@george1421 said in FOG speed problem:

The FOG server only moves disk blocks from its local storage and sends them out the network adapter. The fog server does monitor the imaging process but does not perform heavy computational load

What about in the case of using storage nodes? Does the Fog server tell the target where the data blocks are then the target only talks to the storage node?

[george1421]

@DBCountMan Yes if you are using the location plugin. Using the location plugin you assign the storage node to a location and then when you register the target computer with FOG you assign the target computer to a location. Then when the computer pxe boots it learns who it needs to communicate with. So a storage node would work in this case to spread the load.

One caveat with storage nodes is that they can’t capture images. Only the master node can capture images. Then all storage nodes (including the master node) in the same storage group can deploy the image.