Distribution servers

[Ckoadiyn]

What is the hardware everyone is using for distribution servers? Is there min specs for distro servers anywhere as I couldn't find any information for suggested hardware.

[rderewianko]

It all depends on factors, such as how many clients will be hitting it.
How big your repo is.
What OS you plan on running it on.

We're not that high usage, so we use mac minis fully decked out for ours, which double as apple caching servers.

[Ckoadiyn]

We have about 14000 devices and currently using only 3 mac minis one as main and the other two as load balancers as distro and having issues we are trying to find out if we need more computers or beefier comps. Our repo is probably about 90gigs. And our jss is running on 2012 r2.

[Ckoadiyn]

We have about 14000 devices and currently using only 3 mac minis one as main and the other two as load balancers as distro and having issues we are trying to find out if we need more computers or beefier comps. Our repo is probably about 90gigs. And our jss is running on 2012 r2.

[davidacland]

There are a bunch of other factors that could influence it. If the connections are only occasional and for small items it's not going to hit them as hard compared to something like imaging runs.

My feeling would be that they may be under powered for the task though. You could improve the capacity by using Mac Pros, more RAM and 10Gb Ethernet instead. Or go a bit more scientific, gather specific data to determine the bottle neck and target that.

If money isnt too much of an issue, I'd go down the Mac Pro & 10Gb Ethernet route personally.

[Chris_Hafner]

We're skewed compared to these numbers. We have 3 DPs running on MacPro's (2x 2010s and 1x early 2015). One on our primary fiber switch, one in our primary NOC and one in the secondary NOC. Admittedly this is generally for redundancy. We've got less than 1000 users so...

The performance is rather spectacular though. We did the 10.10 upgrade over the air in about 20 min from start of policy to the welcome screen. That's over WiFi on campus.

[dmw3]

We are using a combo of Xserves and RHEL VM's, the VM's are in our data centre and also in a remote site.

We have a client base of 1500 computers spread around a 1600km area. most clients are on 10GB ethernet or Wi-Fi.