Recommendations for Server
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I am looking to make a FOG Server. My organization would most likely image 20-30 machines at a time. What is the best recommendation for a tower server for this?
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Really it depends not so much as how many you will image at a time but how many total systems will be managed by your FOG server.
A circa 2010 desktop with an SSD drive would be more than enough to image systems. Just for a matter of scale, I can image 2 computers at the same time with FOG installed on a Raspberry Pi3. The heavy lifting (so to speak) during imaging is not done by the fog server, but by the FOG client. All the fog server needs to do during imaging is to move the image file from the hard drive to the network adapter and to manage the process. Its not a heavy workload.
Now when you say 20-30 machines at a time. That can be done with a multicast image (one to many) as long as your network is capable of multicasting. If you are trying to deploy to 20 computers using unicasting (one to one) then you will run into a problem in that your infrastructure probably can’t handle that much data (no necessarily related to the FOG server).
Lets start out with how do you plan on using FOG in your environment?
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For reference : My test FOG server is running on a HP Compaq 6000 Pro SFF PC. I actually used it this summer to deploy images for one of our buildings (was easier to get multicast up since it was on same vlan. Live server is on different vlan.)
I was doing about 20-30 PC’s at a time with multicast on this server. Deployed image in about 15 minutes. The server was plugged into a 10/100 port at the time.
Was running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Although I’d probably do CentOS next time.
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I decided to get a Poweredge T330 with a Xeon processor.
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@imagingmaster21 That is probably a bit overkill for the FOG server. But as they say more is always better.
Just make sure you order it with an array controller that is compatible with linux. The cheap windows only raid controllers (SXXX series adapters) won’t work with linux, so don’t even try if you are installing linux on bare metal.
