FOG and NIC bonding questions

[dr6figures]

Hi Everyone,

First, many, MANY thanks (I’m not shouting in anger, just expressing my sincere appreciation) to everyone who helped bring FOG to reality, especially those who have worked hard to make it Windows 8 friendly. I have used FOG now since 2008, and 1.2.0 has been awesome in helping me handle my Windows 8 deployments!

As to my question… I use FOG on an isolated network, just for imaging. I run Ubuntu Server OS and use FOG for DHCP to dole out IP addresses to 15 client machines. The image that I push down to these machines is roughly 37 GB in size. It takes about 35 – 40 minutes to push down the image to all clients (Dell Optiplex 780s).

I’ve been reading up on NIC bonding and FOG since the server has 2 ethernet interfaces. If I enable NIC bonding on the server, would that improve deployment time? Could I be a little more creative and add a storage node with dual NICs and nic bonding to deploy images along with the main server for a faster deployment?

I would just like to see if there is anything that I can do to improve the deployment time.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Mentaloid]

Bonding works wonders, but beware your switch has to support it… and unless it’s LACP, you won’t benefit fully.

35 minutes seems a bit long for 37 gigs… <math>37g/35min=1.06 gigs per min</math> yes, that’s quite low. 4-5 gigs per minute with a single gigabit link from the server is pretty standard with multicast. Are you using Multicast? Any other bottlenecks? Decent switch? Unicast to a single client is 4-6 gigs per min?

[dr6figures]

Thanks [URL=‘http://fogproject.org/forum/members/mentaloid.4362/’][B]Mentaloid[/B][/URL] for your reply.

No, I am not using Multicast. The last time I used it (with FOG .32), when I went to deploy Multicast, the switch and PCs chocked (it said something ridiculous like 10 hours or so to deploy the image). I don’t know if the switch supports it or not. Unicast to 1 PC does yield much better download speeds, at least 3 GB/min, sometimes more. When you start adding, though, the speed decreases to around 900 KB/min to 1ish GB/min for all 15 PCs being imaged. The switch is a gigabit switch. All 15 nodes are Dell 780s with Gigabit ethernet, and the server also has 2x 1 GB ethernet ports. The server runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (I built the server in early July.)

So, if I try to implement bonding, I take it that it will not help much if the switch doesn’t support it? The reason I ask is that when I looked into this, there were several bond modes and only mode 4 (802.3ad) specifically specified needing support on the switch end.

Thanks again!