JSS as a Linux VM

[brian_flynn]

I wanted to get people's opinion on running the JSS as a Virtual Machine. Is anyone running the JSS on a VM (linux in particular) and if so, how's it perform?

We're currently running the JSS on a Mac Pro since Apple has discontinued the Xserve. I'm not too happy running a server on what really equates to workstation class hardware (even if it is really nice hardware).

Our intel environment is over 90% virtualized, so I was thinking of migrating the JSS to a Virtual Machine running RHEL or CentOS. We run VMware vSphere 4 for our virtual infrastructure and can allocate plenty of CPU, RAM, and disk space to the VM (was thinking of starting a test with 2CPU, 8GB RAM, and 50GB disk).

My big concern is I/O. Our JSS environment is pretty small right now (about 250 clients) but it's growing rapidly and within a year I can see that number tripling.

Thanks
Brian

[jarednichols]

Someone on the mailing list mentioned that their JSS runs in a Linux VM and they don't see any I/O issues, though they did dedicate hardware disk to it rather than virtual to get around that.

As far as distro goes, I'd go with RHEL or Ubuntu, mainly because they're both supported install options from JAMF. Myself, I'd go with RHEL as there's someone to call when things go wonky.

[shrop]

We run on JSS server on on OS X 10.6 Server with VMWare Fusion on an Xserve. It works just fine. Seems that memory is what we had to increase in the VM to satisfy Tomcat. Have distro servers helps to take some of the load off of the JSS server, at least file sharing installs and such.

So, I think Linux would work fine, but I agree with Jared above.. go with an OS which JAMF supports. I think that is always sound advice.

[jreazor]

We're running our JSS on an RHEL VM in vSphere. We only have a few clients but I have no doubt that we could scale the VM appropriately if it became resource constrained. It's been rock solid since it was installed.

It did take some time and effort during out Jump Start to get it configured properly.

[stevewood]

I just recently moved my JSS over to Ubuntu Server, and it's running like a champ. I have a little over 150 clients checking in, and I haven't seen a single hiccup yet.

[ToriAnneke]

@ Steve: I'm hoping to do the same but got stuck on installing MySQL 5.5 on my Ubuntu 10.04 running on VMWare.

Would you happen to have the steps you've done outlined?

thanks in advance!!

[stevewood]

Pat I just followed the instructions that came with the 8.3 Linux installer. There is a PDF inside that zip file that explains how to do it. I used apt-get to install all of the necessary bits and pieces. I did not let the Ubuntu install do any of the Apache or mySQL pieces.

[dhowell]

I run our VM RHEL 5, have 1100 Mobile Devices and no Issues, We have a separate JSS for our Desktops it is still Xserve. My Distrubution Points are all VM's (RHEL 5) and we use SMB and 1gb RAM for each. no issues. we have 9000 Desktop Clients.

[brian_flynn]

Very good to know many people are running the JSS and DP's as VM's without issue in production.

@dhowell, very good to know you've got so many desktop clients using RHEL VM DP's. I've thought of moving our DP's to linux VMs and use SMB along with reposado to manage local software updates.

@stevewood, did you run into any gotchas migrating over to Ubuntu? I may test out JSS on it and use this opportunity to learn something new. I'm troubled a bit that Ubuntu is based off the testing branch of Debian and was wondering about it's stability.

[christhehunter]

Hi all,

We run our jss on rhel6 x64 and have experienced no issues. We have over 500 macs checking back fine. We did have a physical dell r715 dedicated to the database/tomcat side of things as well as serving the DP via samba/http from a nice chunk of fiber channel attached disk but considered this was a little pointless as it was bottlenecking at the server end. At one point we were required to rollout an office update over the course of a few days and that brought the server and DP to a grinding halt due to the amount of IO across the single path.

We now are serving a single DP from a large NAS array we have recently installed with a 10gig uplink, which has seen no problems at all. It's great having a seperate DP to your physical host, being a vm or single os machine as you're not sending the DP traffic through the same nics as your web/database traffic. I guess you can experience the same throughput with multiple esx hosts with a single jss and multiple DPs as long as the DPs are on differing esx hosts and DP traffic isn't along the same path.

Anyway, Running JSS hosted as a VM is fine.