Imaging Fusion Drives

[sgorney]

Hey all,

So we just got in some fancy new 27" iMacs with Fusion Drives. We captured an OS image from them and created a new config with our standard packages. Problem is when we go to clean image the iMac with the new OS config, the machine is un-bootable after imaging and the partition is not visible. I suspect it has something to do with the CoreStorage technology and Casper not handling it properly. We using the 8.62 suite FYI. Anybody had any experience with this and have a workaround or fix?

Thanks!

[easyedc]

We are in the middle of deploying out 27's with Fusion as well. Where is your OS Config coming from? the our iMacs are build 12c3103, which is a one-off build of OS X 10.8.2. So if you're using a build that was built for other machines, it probably won't work. You'll have to wait until a unified build of 10.8.3 for it to work cleanly.

We ended up using the Stock OS (since there's nothing that has been done to it out of the box) and building a specific OS-less configuration that just applied all the settings that we need.

[sgorney]

We are using an OS Image from the iMac itself.

[sgorney]

We are using an OS Image from the iMac itself.

[barnesaw]

We also don't OS image a new Mac. Haven't found an upside to doing so yet.

By the time we (1) get fusion drive macs and (2) they need to be re-imaged, I'm sure 10.9 will be out and will support fusion drives out of the box.

[nkalister]

I've successfully imaged mini's with fusion drives and didn't experience anything out of the ordinary. The only issue I've seen with fusion drives is that they are not compatible with enabling file vault 2 using the -defer flag. Apple has confirmed this as a bug and is working on it. But that's it, everything else works as expected.
However, we image from a bootable USB stick using a local DP, which is not the norm for many other orgs.
Are you net booting?

[JPDyson]

nkalister, are you using a thin-imaging approach, or are you replacing the OS & Recovery partitions? Did it apply those to the LVG, or directly to the member drives?

If you're not replacing the OS, I have all confidence that Casper will do fine applying what I call a "roll-up" image (essentially, all of the non-OS packages).

[nkalister]

for the mini's, we did replace the OS. But they didn't need a special build, they're supported by the version of 10.8.2 in the app store. Imaged just fine onto the corestorage volume as expected.

[JPDyson]

I can reproduce your results; "thick" imaging does seem to work fine. The error I was getting before was an... unorthodox configuration.

Our base OS image comes from a Retina 13, which doesn't seem to take 10.8.2 retail.