It’s an ESXi 6.0 host. I did notice that with the VMXNET adapter as the emulated NIC that the OS was seeing a 10Gb link speed… however that was the config under which I was seeing Ethernet throughput choke with more than 3 clients unicasting.
Funnily enough I had tried multicasting a lab first, which… didn’t work (the infamous problem where all hosts check in but don’t start deploying). I really should look into that as well since, truth be told, it’s definitely the way to go when pushing the same image out to identical hardware. My motivation for pushing the limit of how many unicast tasks I can run simultaneously is because this client has an extensive (not in the good way) assortment of hardware and applications out there, varying from single threaded Northwood P4s up to Broadwell i5s (guess which they have more of…).
I’m definitely going to try out trunk to see how it runs with multithreaded decompression. I’ve also read of a number of other items that have been addressed which I’ve not really run into issues with so far, but it’d be reassuring to know there’s less of a chance of them dropping in on me unexpectedly.
Regarding the number of machines that “need” to be imaged per hour… first and foremost the setup I had before trying to push the envelope with this endeavor was already a tenfold improvement over the old setup; a 100 Mb server, 100 Mb switches, etc. So just with the new infrastructure we’ve gone from 30 minutes per machine to less than 10. My vision is where one person can go into a classroom to boot up a host, register it (if needed) and start the imaging task, then and walk away then go do the next machine in the next room and have none of the machines need to wait in the queue to start pulling an image - while all image at peak throughput relative to the capability of their hardware. In short it’s the “new network… push it to its limits to see what it’s capable of” mindset.
Upon leaving for the afternoon I had disabled storage node 3, but storage node 2 as well as the default remained enabled and imaging tasks seemed to proceed normally. I still haven’t confirmed whether or not it’s using two NICs to handle throughput yet though - but hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to examine that tomorrow.
Thanks everyone for the input and suggestions. The fresh perspective helps keep me from digging too deep in the wrong places.
