Can I set up 2 fog servers to image a pool of hosts at the same time from the same build request
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My organization has come to really depend on FOG. They wanted me to build a hot standby server incase the primary one goes bad because we are running on physical hosts, and sometimes we can be imaging 100’s of laptops within a week it could be super critical to deadlines if this box went down.
Since we spent the money on new hardware to mirror the existing physical FOG server, I was curious if there was a way to utilize both at the same time. Is anyone else doing something similiar. How would I config FOG to do this?Right now FOG is not the dhcp server, but our dhcp server is sending the laptops a dhcp request which tells all the new laptops where the fog server is to get PXE booted. knowing what my environment looks like how should i build this second server to maximize the functionality of having 2 beefy fog servers. I’d hate to leave it as a hot standby.
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@llightfoot You could spin up a new (clone) of the production FOG server. Make it a full FOG server. This “backup” FOG server will be added as a storage node to your primary FOG server’s as the master node.
The main technical differences between a storage node and a full FOG server is that the full FOG server has the FOG database on it, where a storage node does not.
When you manually add this second full FOG server as a storage node on your master node, the master node will sync all of the raw data files from the current production FOG server to your faux storage node. This will keep the image files you create on the main fog server in sync on the backup FOG server. The only gotcha in this configuration is that you need a way to copy the FOG database from the production server to the backup FOG server. You can do this with a little scripting to use the mysqldump command to export the data from the master node and then rsync or scp to copy it over to the backup storage node.
As a side note, unless you have a lot of computers with the FOG client installed banging on the FOG server, you don’t need a fog server with a lot of horsepower. I can run FOG on a Raspberry Pi. With that said, all you really need for a fog server is a computer with a fast network and fast disk. Now imaging 100s of computers in a week you must be doing something extraordinary with your fog setup. Bravo for that!
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George’s post is valid. Just wanted to add that regular ole storage nodes within the same storage group will load share. You’d set the max hosts on each storage node to accomplish this.