Thanks for the responses so far. I’ll try to answer the questions from everyone.
@george1421 - My FOG Server is a VM on a XenServer (7.3). The VM is running CentOS 7.4.1708, and has 4GB RAM and 2 CPUs allocated. Looking at the memory usage on the server, it doesn’t appear critical, but I have plenty of RAM in the master, so I can certainly try adding more. Disk subsystem is a large number of 2TB drives (24 I think?) in RAID configuration, though I’d have to check the management console to say which config. It’s hardware raid though, and the XenCenter for that VM doesn’t seem to show that it is taxing the disk subsystem. This is a pretty beefy VM server.
The t410i machines have 7200RPM 500GB drives. The t480 machines have 256GB M.2 SSDs.
Deploying one t480 ends up between 400-500MB/m.
Deploying one t410i shows expected throughput from a 1Gb port.
Deploying multiple t480 (unicast) ends up between 400-500MB/m on each machine.
I’ve not deployed multiple t410i (unicast) since trading out the switch and going to a 10GbE link to the server, but with the previous hardware, they shared a single 1GbE link to the server and it showed in the statistics.
Looking at the BIOS on the t410i, I don’t see any uEFI switch, so I presume it’s running in traditional boot.
With the t480s, UEFI is set to “only” and CSM Support has to be on, otherwise rEFInd complains and forces a “press any key” screen to appear after imaging completes.
For testing purposes, I changed the boot setting to Legacy Only on one t480, and it hasn’t made a difference in Deploy speed.
I will check the firmware version, but it is probably current since the machines were build-to-order, and they were shipped directly to us only a couple of weeks ago.
Deploying a t410i on a particular network port and then trying a t480 on the same port shows the t410i with proper throughput, and the t480 with very low throughput.
Re: 1GbE vs 100Mb/s link, I have checked in the switch management interface when a t480 deploy is running, and the link speed is listed as 1GbE.
@Tom-Elliott - I’m also leaning toward the t480s having some sort of strange issue. It could be BIOS-level, or maybe client kernel level. The fact that it captures at a normal fraction of link speed but deploys at much reduced speed makes me think it’s not the FOG Server.
@sebastian-roth - I started with whatever client kernel was installed with 1.5.0, and updated to 4.17.0 in an attempt to debug. Should I try going back farther?
Some additional data and stuff I’ve tried today:
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The 8-machine multicast that I mentioned starting never completed. It stalled at 22%, and I let it sit for a bit to see if it would recover. It never did.
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As mentioned above, I changed one to Legacy BIOS mode, and that didn’t change the deploy throughput.
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I’ve looked through the t480 BIOS config pretty closely, and I don’t see anything related to network that I think would make a difference.
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Early on when starting to make these machines image smoothly, I had to turn off the IP6 stack for netboot.