Skip to main content

I'm building out a recommended solution to support a fleet of up to 250 Macs in a Windows-centric environment.

I'm excited to be able to utilize Jamf. I've been reading the admin guide as far as the components but I'm still unsure what's needed as far as hardware - other than the server.

JSS will be run from a VM since it's already part of the infrastructure and very easy to spin up.

What does everyone recommend for running composer? I was thinking a Mac Mini.
Would I need one for imaging? Or - does the JSS handle this?

Should I have any other hardware to run other components?

Mac Mini would be fine as would any modern Mac really. You should also get a few TB (ThunderBolt) external drives for imaging and storing data if you need to wipe/restore to setup images.

Keep a MacBook as your daily driver and get a 27" iMac Pro (because you'll need to be able to test the new SecureBoot stuff coming down the pike) with as much memory as they'll stomach, and then plan on using VM's for (most) all your test and development needs.

I'm on a 21 inch iMac with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD and it does the job just fine for packaging, the only thing I would say is get plenty of storage as the resulting packages can be large and if your working through iterations or development it is nice to keep a fair number of packages in composer storage area to allow changes to be quickly implemented and tested. It's also pretty nice if your doing change capture or deployment tests to have at least one device that can be wiped on demand.
As nice as an iMac Pro would be for testing secure boot issues the cost makes having one as a test machine pretty untennable for us.

Terms & ConditionsCookie settingsAccessibility statement