System Requirements
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I am planning on managing a few labs on fog what are you running fog on for a system? Is it a resource hog? I am going to be using the fog client on the machines. We are a K12 school most likely 50 computers on one machine.
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The easiest to get FOG installed on is currently Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 LTS. Just download and install from the Ubuntu website, follow the instructions to update the OS, then install FOG. Newer versions have minor issues to work around, so if you are new, stay away from them. Also, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has a wider support base in the FOG forums than other flavors and versions of Linux.
For your server, your hardware requirements depend on how you want to use FOG. I tend to do mass reimaging in the 2 months before school starts with as many as 30 clients at a time at 100MB nics, or 10 clients on 1000MB nics. For this to work, the disk subsystem of the server needs to be able to handle massive read requests. I use a RAID 5 array made of 6 disks. I use a 20GB partition for the OS, and the rest for the /images directory for FOG. This is a more advanced setup and only used because I was on my 4th FOG server setup when I got this newer hardware, so I knew was I was doing. The RAID 5 array is fault tolerant and extremely fast for read operations, which is 99% of what you’ll be doing in FOG.
I use a gigabit switches and a gigabit NIC in the server.
Unless you are skilled in switch/router configurations for multicasting, I would stick with unicasting 10 to 20 clients at a time. The higher the transfer rate from the disks and through the network, the faster the clients complete their imaging process.
If you’re machines are running Windows XP or newer, and have at least 1GB of ram, then you do not need to worry much about FOG client using resources.