Is there limit on the number of Netboot clients?

[dgagstetter]

We seem to be running into some kind of limit w/ the Netboot/SUS appliance. We can get 9 machines to netboot but the 10th one fails. Has anyone else run into this?

[hkim]

There are some reports out there that there is a limit over AFP, there shouldn't be over HTTP, but there are reports that some are having issues with diskless and 10.8 that may also cause similar issues.

I'm finding that the best practice in 10.8 is to not use diskless NetBoot sets, and to create RAM disks to simulate diskless for 10.8 based NetBoot sets using the techniques listed at.

http://www.macos.utah.edu/documentation/administration/setup_netboot_service_on_mac_os_x_10.6.x_client.x_client/setup_netboot_service_on_mac_os_x_10.6.x_client-diskless_netboot.html

[Bukira]

That is diskless netboot but rather than using afp it creates a ram disk to boot from, it also fixes the bug in 10.8 netboot, and also shouldnt have a limit as your not using AFP

[CGundersen]

We aren't using the appliance in production (so far only in my test lab at home), but we are in prime imaging season and are finding that sites are saturating their gig link to our data center with imaging traffic. (Apple's) NetBoot falls over at that point and we start getting calls. NetBooting against the same (regional) server from other sites (that aren't saturating their link) during this period is fine. I was planning to go in the direction of trying to load balance NetBoot until the site link bottleneck became apparent. I would like to see better multicast support/interest from JAMF, but at the same time we are not ready/excited about compiling a zillion configurations. Good times.