Getting memcached right before upgrading to Jamf Pro 10

blackholemac
Valued Contributor III

I have a 5 member cluster: 1 database, 3 client tomcat nodes, 1 admin console. If I bring memcached into the equation, I am able to add at most one extra Ubuntu server to support memcached. What kind of memcached configuration settings would be optimal for my environment? We currently have about 6000 1 to 1 DEP enrolled iPads and about 500+ Macs. I am planning on some but not a great amount of expansion...a thousand iPads or less. Do I need two memcached servers or is a single one sufficient? I don’t want overkill but I don’t want to ask the VMWare guys for more than a single additional VM. Thoughts or input? Can’t move to a Jamf hosted solution though.

Sorry tagged post wrong with netinstall and it won’t let me change.

6 REPLIES 6

dan-snelson
Valued Contributor II

@blackholemac FWIW, the Red Hat VMs we use for our Distribution Points were under utilized enough that I installed Memcached on them and they've been working like a champ for all the Jamf Pro 10 betas.

My current understanding is that you'll want at least two Memcached servers in case one goes offline.

unknown_err
New Contributor III

From what we've been told by Jamf, it would be best to set up 2 memcached servers so you have a failover in case one memcached server goes down. So the info will be fully cached on both even though only one will be actually used at any given time. You'll also want each tomcat node to have the same memcached config to prevent any issues. If Jamf starts putting more data onto the memcached servers you may eventually need to scale up but 2 should be more than sufficient for the current environment, as far as I know.

tlarkin
Honored Contributor

+1 on the 2x memcache servers. You'll want 2 just for fail over. In fact our memcache servers already maxed out on connections (we set it up with the default config at first) and it was failing over to the second node. You'll probably want to toss a ton of RAM in them too, because eventually you will be able to cache lots of things. Right now I don't see much in there (since we don't use buildings and network segments) except for dock items. When they start caching more and more objects though you'll want that RAM.

In fact down the road you might want more than 2 if your environment gets large and you want more redundancy. The memcache servers aren't very CPU intensive though, so you might be able to piggy back them on a different service. I would recommend you actually make them standalone servers though, you don't want your memcache servers to be taken down due to Apache maintenance on the same box for example.

dstranathan
Valued Contributor II

Does anyone know if Couchbase will work in place of memcached on Windows Server?

https://www.couchbase.com/memcached

zinkotheclown
Contributor II

My support agent says you don't need memcached for JAMF Pro 10. I've just disabled it while troubleshooting an issue.

They removed that requirement because of some pushback.

kstrick
Contributor III

Like @dstranathan I'm wondering if I should go to couchbase, or use an old memcached installer. From @zinkotheclown 's post, sounds like I may not need to as we go up to 10, but I suspect there is a reason it is preferred...
(or is it really not worth the time, not much memcached experience.. yet)