Remote office imaging with FOG
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is there any guide out there for imaging computers at remote offices using FOG ?
we have several offices and would like to image computers using FOG.not sure how we can use fog for this. please help. -
You might need to describe how the remote offices are connected to HQ and what link speeds you have.
How many computers are at the remote offices.
Do you have any IT support at the remote locations?
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remote offices connected to HQ with VPN tunnels. not sure about speed. at each site we have about 20 to 30 desktops and laptops to be re imaged. No IT support at any remote site.
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@mpatel OK a few more question. What is your plan for imaging at the remote site (physical action plan)? Will you send a IT Tech to the remote site and image all of the computers or do you want to do everything remotely?
Do you have hardware you can send to the remote site to act as a FOG server? Understand that a circa 2016 laptop with 4GB of RAM and a SSD is more than enough computer for a FOG server for less than 50 computers.
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@mpatel Hello!
I have been working on a project for remote use at my company too. We have too many sites that are not way connected (Besides remote support software) to Headquarters. We also have sites in over 25+ countries. I don’t know if this will help, I just wanted to share my experience with the same issue. Unfortunately, its 1 FOG server per Site.
- I found getting hardware out to these sites is very expensive and time consuming, so I configured a virtual machine to be deployed to a server at each site with FOG pre-installed. (Each site has the same network setup… Thankfully).
- Most of my images are on Lubuntu, and are less than 2GB. So sending the VHD file was not a large issue. For sites with very low bandwidth, it can take 2 days, but that’s not too bad.
- One the VHD arrives, it was simple to remote into the device and get all of them up and running. (Using KVM).
- Since I didn’t want to deploy already captured images to the servers, I used our support software to access the server and capture the images that were needed from the devices in the site. (Getting the MAC and Hostname was not an issue, our support software displays that for us.)
Currently, my next plan involves creating an ISO of linux using Pre-seed and having FOG install and configure itself whenever we deploy new hardware. It has been working in my DEV lab, but I am still logging errors that might pop-up and trying to prevent them. Usually I see errors with the database, but that is usually resolved by not having a MYSQL password.
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@george1421 we want to do remote imaging. we can get help from ppl in offices to do PXE boot and onscreen prompt selection of FOG menu. once computer imaged and gets DHCP IP we can take over from here.
our main concern is pushing image from HQ to remote offices. The image that we uploaded to FOG is about 15GB in size so not sure how long it will take to do one computer.
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@mpatel said in Remote office imaging with FOG:
The image that we uploaded to FOG is about 15GB in size so not sure how long it will take to do one computer
This depends very much on the connection between HQ and remote site. As we still don’t know the speed of your connection I will just do some rough estimations and examples:
- With 50 MBit/s it would take 40 min to transfer 15 GB
- With 10 MBit/s it would take 3 h 20 min to transfer 15 GB
- With 1 MBit/s it would take 33 h 20 min to transfer 15 GB
Understand those figures are all just theoretical numbers and it won’t be that fast in the real world. On a 10 MBit/s link that is not being extensively used you might expect to see it transfer in 5 hours if you are lucky. And still there is a chance connection breaks and you will have to start over again. So unless you have at least 25 MBit/s speed from FOG server to remote site (upstream speed on your HQ and downstream speed on the remote site) I wouldn’t go for a remote deployment.
But there are ways to get around this. You can setup separate FOG servers or FOG storage nodes at your remote sites. Image transfer to the remote sites would be once when you create the image or change it. The deployment will all happen within the remote sites local subnet - full speed. This is why George asked you some important questions on your setup. We can’t help you if you don’t provide the information.
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@mpatel as others have mentioned here - speed is the key; we’re in an identical situation, all sites connect to HQ via VPN but then all sites have Gig Internet so imaging machines at the remote sites has never been an issue, you just talk the end user over the phone to his F12 and that’s that (FOG job must be submitted ahead of time of course).
