Deep Freeze & Fusion Drive Woes

[daryll_holland]

Newbie here, thanks for all the awesome support that this site provides.

Now, my team are reasonably new to Casper (and Macs in general!) and are using it to deploy applications to various student labs of Mac computers spread about the UK. Long story short, it's working great and we just set about Deep Freezing them to reset the configuration upon reboot. We've discovered far too late in the process that Deep Freeze (we're using the Cloud edition) doesn't support fusion drives which I really wish we'd picked up, or were told about at the pre-sales stage.

Regardless, we're going to attempt to make it work by splitting the drives and here is my question. Has anyone else done this that might be able to offer some insight into how they managed it? I came across [https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=9366](this) thread but it seems to render the SSD useless.

Has anyone used the SSD for the OS and stored all applications on the larger slower drive or something like that? Any constructive advice greatly received!

[CasperSally]

Why use deepfreeze? Lock down computers with config profiles, delete user profiles if you need to.

[Josh_OKState]

What would you recommend locking down in config profiles? We use Centurion but it also is not compatible with fusion/SSD and half of my labs are 5k's...

[CasperSally]

If users aren't administrators, that's half the battle as a lot of things require admin permissions.

We block out certain system prefs, block what folders apps can launch from (so students can't run call of duty from the desktop, for example), set homepages, just some examples.

[Josh_OKState]

Interesting. I haven't tinkered with that very much. Right now all of my users come through Active Directory/LDAP and they are networked/managed users. Even the instructors, the only admin's are my department and the local service account. I haven't messed with setting instructors as administrators yet.

[htse]

Deconstructing Fusion Drive back to two physical volumes isn't difficult through diskutil corestorage https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/diskutil.8.html

Keep in mind that the Fusion Drives in the current iMacs are equipped with a smaller 24GB, so unless your configuration is lean and mean, you might hit a wall if you lean on the Solid State too much.

[daryll_holland]

Thanks for all of the feedback.

Deep Freeze is really cheap all things considered and for the Windows boxes we implemented it was a must have in order to minimise any administrative overheads that arise from student use.

Current state for this institution is two local accounts are created, a generic student account and a staff admin account. In an ideal world we'd have had a directory in place by now but due to the nature of the project, we don't have that currently.

We're testing splitting out the drives, but as I said in my initial post, the applications by default get installed onto the OS drive (my understanding) so we really need advice on how to best utilise a 128GB SSD and 1TB SATA in this scenario. Is it possible to install all the apps on the SATA for example?

[htse]

I wouldn't advise it, for a mass deployment, I think you'd end up with too many gotchas and workarounds not to mention updates. Firstly you'd end up with two /Applications folders, and then you'd have secondly package installer targets it's install onto blessed volumes, not folders