Is it possible to store Images centrally and deploy them from different servers?
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I apologize if the questions exists elsewhere, but i couldn’t find it quickly. I work in a school district with 7+ buildings and that many or more subnets for each of them. and we manage serveral images per building, utilizing the same image where possible. We’re trying to move away from Symantec ghost because its expensive and a all around pain to use anymore.
My real question is this:
id like to be able to keep all of my images in a central place for storage , and use a server at each building to deploy them, however in my adventures with fog, i have installed a server and a storage node and it seems to me that the storage node only connects to one server. Manually copying the image from a server to storage and back to a deployment server is a fine option for me and ive tried just copying the image manually ( through winscp copy paste) from one server to another but the image doesnt show up on the server it wasnt created on. -
You are describing the typical fog server (1 master fog server) and many storage nodes. The fog server will replicate any images on the master fog server to all of the storage nodes in the storage group. You would use the location plugin to direct the clients to the proper storage node for pxe booting, image deployment, and snapin deployments.
Just be aware in this setup you may only capture images to the master fog server.
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@george1421 Thank you! i guess in all my quick reading i came to the conclusion that server would replicate ALL the images to all the nodes that way. I will continue to build out this scenario and see where it takes me.
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@jherron said in Is it possible to store Images centrally and deploy them from different servers?:
i came to the conclusion that server would replicate ALL the images to all the nodes that way
I want to make sure we are on the same page here.
- Any image stored on the master node will be replicated to all storage nodes in the storage group.
- Only the master node of any storage group can capture images. The storage nodes can only deploy replicated images and pxe boot target computers.
On the master node you can selectively enable/disable an image from replication to the storage nodes. You can also disable images to prevent them from being used to image machines.
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@jherron said in Is it possible to store Images centrally and deploy them from different servers?:
i guess in all my quick reading i came to the conclusion that server would replicate ALL the images to all the nodes that way
Not true, it’s configurable.
The master of a group will replicate to non-masters of it’s group, and an image will replicate from it’s primary master to the master of groups it’s shared with. A server can be a member of one or many groups. And an image can be a member of one or many groups. On top of all this, replication can be disabled on a per-image basis. FOG’s replication scheme enables ultimate configurability.I worked at a large school district before my current job - we had something like 15 or 16 locations. I’m guessing the needs at my last job are not much different from yours.
In the end at my old job - I made the main fog server the master of it’s own group with no other members in the group, and then I made each storage node at each remote site a master in it’s very own group.
With this setup, a technician can choose to create an image specific to their building only on their local server only by simply picking their building’s storage group during image creation. If an image was to be made available at all sites, it would be created in the main server’s group and then shared out to the other groups at the image level.
Image sharing is where things become most flexible, whereas throwing all nodes into a single group is a simple approach and non-technical people understand it without any problem - but it is very lacking in flexibility. It’s all up to you on what you do. I would suggest spending the extra 2 minutes to explore image sharing. Using the above rules I’ve wrote out in the first paragraph, you can sketch out the scheme you want on paper and then easily go implement it.
These two articles are just the basics - but keep in mind you can go beyond this without much effort or complexity, it’s just clicks in the web interface.
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Replication
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Location_Plugin -
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@Wayne-Workman @george1421 thank you both so much. you’ve been incredibly helpful!
