Hello Everyone,
We are joining the JAMF community and will be setting up Casper very soon. I wanted to poll the people already using the product to see how they setup their server architecture and see if anyone has any "gotchas" we might want to be aware of.
A quick run-down of our environment: I am at a university with an extremely decentralized layout, VLANs and public IPs galore, many customized machines and a relatively small mac population that will certainly grow over time. We are probably the most complex environment with the fewest macs of anyone using Casper. As of now the mac population is 125 macs, that will scale to 400 over the next several years.
Right now we are trying to decide on whether to use a VM or physical server, the concern being that I/O intensive things like netbooting could have an adverse effect on other vm servers in the cluster. We're leaning toward a physical linux server to host the repository and JSS, and possibly just have the SQL database live in a VM (since VMs are easier to manage and that gives us more agility if a failure occurs - the repository could be uploaded from another box pretty easily). We would be using the repo for netboot/software deployment and SUS. We support creative curriculums so our apps are rather large. My thought is 7-9 TB should be enough for all of those things.
Given we have multiple buildings across campus to support and the switches are not all gig, we are also wondering if distribution points would be necessary. It's unlikely we'd be doing a great deal of netbooting; more often we'll be pushing patches and software, collecting inventory.
If anyone can offer some advice to spare us from any growing pains they experienced during initial rollout (or maybe even later when you tried to scale) that would be much appreciated.
Thanks all, looking forward to using this suite!