JSS System Hardware Configurations - What's yours?

tnielsen
Valued Contributor

I've been using an i7 mac mini with 8GB RAM and an internal raid 0 since we first purchased the JSS.

It can be slow at times. I'm switching to a Mac Pro (2012 model) with more RAM and SSD internal raid. Will be binding the dual gigabit ports. Got me wondering, what are you guys using?

Is there anything I'm overlooking to increase performance?

Please forgive my poorly written-in-haste message, but I think y'all get the idea.

12 REPLIES 12

mike_rowland
New Contributor

Hi,

We are currently running a windows server 2012 setup. Moving to enterprise linux. I have a test environment that is a late 2013 mac pro 6 core with 1TB PCIe2 Flash storage. It is way more than I need for testing, but It will allow me to virtualize for testing different configurations

tnielsen
Valued Contributor

Thanks Mike.

Taylor_Armstron
Valued Contributor

You mention performance, but you're not saying anything about how many clients/policies/etc. you have.

I hope you have a good backup of that RAID0... that's the one approach I'd never take in production.

FWIW, we run it on a Windows 2012 server VM, with 4gb of RAM allocated in a hyper-v cluster. Works just fine for our ~100 clients. Packages are hosted on a directory of our NetApp, with a backup repository on an old xServe, so zero impact on the JSS itself from there.

jwojda
Valued Contributor II

we went with dual Late 2013 MacPros, 6 Core Xeon @3.5ghz, 16gb ram, 1tb ssd. One houses the JSS/Tomcat, the other houses the mysql db.
Then we have a mini (late 2012) on the DMZ for off network passthrough. All 3 of these are on single port gigabit and the JSS hosts a little over 1200 clients.

The JSS machine also acts as the host distribution point, but it's rare that I deploy from it, instead it's mostly used for replication to the remote DPs.

boberito
Valued Contributor

We have a 2011 MacMini Server with mirrored 1TB SSDs with i7 processor, 16gb of ram, sonnet's 1U shell for the macmini and a thunderbolt to fibre card.

It's our everything, JSS and distribution. It's running Sierra Server.

tnielsen
Valued Contributor

Interesting. Thanks guys.

I do backup my raid0. Failed once so far. No sweat.

Sonic84
Contributor III

I've moved around a lot over the years.... I was on a pair of Apple Xserves, then migrated to a clustered windows virtual server environment, currently I'm back on Mac hardware.

MacPro late 2013 32GB RAM
512SSD
12xCPU
Mac OS X 10.11

I'm moving off this platform soon because of known defects in mySQL for Mac that hinder performance.
The server hardware load is rarely above 20% utilization, however JSS application performance is poor.

Kedgar
Contributor

Like @Sonic84 we have over the years been on a few platforms. Originally we were on an Xserve, we have now been running on RHEL vmware virtual machines since. We have deployed JDS on RHEL VM to many locations, and use Windows server shares as file-server distribution points where we do not have a VMWare architecture, or available licensing to run RHEL. Had some issues with initial setup on RHEL as we did a manual installation and moved some things to custom locations to fit our environment standards. We also are running the DB on a seperate MariaDB RHEL VM. No complaints!

Chris_Hafner
Valued Contributor II

I've got two 2012 MacPro units with Areca HW RAID cards running three 15k7 Cheeta Drives each (Stripped so, RAID 0) and a MacPro late 2013 (trashcan). All have bound gig ethernet setup. One of the 2012's is the Tomcat/MySQL server and a tertiary DP (32GB RAM). The other 2012 is the Primary NetBoot unit as well as a secondary DP (16GB RAM). The late-2013 (trashcan) is the Master DP (Also, 16 GB RAM), using only the internal SSD that it came with. It's also located in our Secondary NOC for failover purposes. The database backup is distributed to each of the units (Dropbox) in case the actual JSS box dies.

There are, of course, backups and the like. However, I've survived a few failures of drives in the 2012s without needing to resort to using backups... or even without setting up the JSS on another box.

Oh, I also forgot to point out that my JSS box (the 2012 running Tomcat/MySQL) uses an SSD from OWC for it's boot drive as that's where the database runs.

bentoms
Release Candidate Programs Tester

I'd split out the JSS & NetBoot/Filesharing duties tbh.

Don't want the JSS crawling as you're imaging.

blackholemac
Valued Contributor III

I'm gonna second @bentoms completely on that...imagine installing MS Office 2016 on 40 computers with a policy and the DP is on the same hardware...the JSS will have slow response times because everyone is hitting Casper to get those Office packages...or consider Adobe software...that is much worse. Or imagine Final Cut Pro X...I hope you get my point.

When our org first started on casper and had 200 iPads and 200 Macs, we used an old Xserve as our DP and a Mac mini (with beefed out specs) as our JSS. There are tons of combinations to DP setup...if we retooled this post to "how are DPs organized for your company?" every admin on here would have some kind of good story.

In answer to the original question, my JSS itself is now a cluster of 5 VMs (3 load balanced, 2 function built). I would give the exact specs of the VMs but it really isn't relevant as I can grow storage with a simple reboot, add RAM with a simple reboot or toss another processor on if Tomcat is getting strange.

conitsupport
Contributor

Late to party but for windows server what would be the minimum process for a VM server to host the JSS at present we have 8 processors 8gb RAM