@george1421 I need to reimage the computers at least every friday evening. It should be done very quickly because we need to check if everything is done correctly before we leave for the weekend. This would be especially important if we would use a new tool like fog-server. The clients need to be done on monday morning.

I don’t think I want to try running the whole fog-server on the nas, I would be too scared if something brakes after updating the NAS-Software for example. A dedicated fog-server seems to be more practicable.

@george1421 said in Use QNAP NAS as source to multicast to clients:

In this case you “in theory” could multicast to 2 groups before flooding your 1GbE server uplink.

With server uplink you mean the uplink to the fog server? Then I see your point now, I either need a fog server connected over 10 GbE, or (for the sake of arguments) I would be able to run the fog server on the NAS? That was what I was trying to find out. I was just hoping that there was some kind of software or tool that would be easier to run on the NAS which would basically just get instructions from the fog server about what files how to multicast over the network. That way the network load would all be on the NAS and not on the server.

But I guess a dedicated server with a 10GbE uplink that has an iSCSI drive or whatever mounted from the NAS seems to be the best option. Thank you.

First, thank you very much for your quick response.

I don’t extactly understand what you are saying. If I understand correctly, you are saying that because the clients are only connected with 1GbE, and that is the maximum they can receive, my 10GbE backbone is pretty much useless. My idea however was that I have multiple multiplecast groups running simultaneously, with each group using only 1GbE, the sum of all can be handled by the NAS and the Switch.

The Switch we are using is already a 24-Port 10GbE Switch, the NAS has a 10GbE card, each multicast group is connected directly to one port, so that while multicasting each port represents one multicast group and over each port only 1Gb/s is transferred. I don’t see how in this network configuration it shouldn’t be possible to deliver 10 files over 10 multicast groups with 1Gb/s per group.

The NAS itself is configured with 5 1TB SSD’s with RAID-5, reading 10Gb/s and transferring it over the network in a way that each port of the core switch doesn’t demand more than 1Gb/s is already no problem.

Hi,

I recently discovered the fog project and while testing I realized how awesome it is and how perfect it could be used in our environment. However, I am not sure if it is really possible to implement the ideas I have.

In our office we have a NAS which is connected over 10GbE to a 10GbE Switch, and that switch is connected over 1GbE to multiple clients. My idea is that these clients are partitioned in multiple groups, and each group would receive different images, each over a multicast session. The point is that the clients in each group would still be able to receive the images with (theoretically) 1Gb/s if there are for example only 10 groups but an arbitrary number of clients (in practice that wouldn’t be more than 10 per group).

From my understanding it wouldn’t be enough to just mount a NAS share on the fog server since that fog server itself is only connected over 1GbE and would represent a bottleneck in that situation.
I assume, and that’s where I am not sure because I haven’t a great understanding in Multicast connections, that I need to run the fog server on the NAS, is this correct? And if so, is it even possible to run a fog server on a QNAP, it’s OS is called QTS 4.2. The OS has it’s own package manager so I guess somehow it has to be possible, but on the other hand I don’t like installing too much stuff I wouldn’t need (like a Web-Interface and such), I was hoping for simpler a way that the fog server on another machine would point the clients to the NAS and somehow directs how the NAS handles the multicast connections to the clients.

The NAS itself has a 1,7GHz Quad-Core CPU and it’s RAM can be upgraded to 8GB RAM, so I would hope performance wouldn’t suffer that much, and even if we would only be able to get like half the bandwith this would be a nice success.

I hope you understood the problem I described and thanks for the great project.

Thanks in advance.