Load Balancer and upscaling suggestions

Phantom155
New Contributor

I am looking for suggestions for a load balancer. At this point in time we only have one server handling all 11,500 computer and 3,900 mobile devices. I am wanting to scale jamf to have atleast three or 4 TomCat instances. My question is...

What Load Balancer Appliance is suggested (Software LB is not an option for us)?
How well do Mac Mini's handle being Tomcat servers only?
How difficult is it to scale up jamf?

I am sure there are some things that I am missing. Any information you can give will be greatly appreciated!

3 REPLIES 3

dgreening
Valued Contributor II

We use a F5 load balancer for our three client facing Tomcat nodes. SSL terminates at the load balancer using a vendor supplied wildcard cert. In terms of difficulty of scaling up Jamf, it is really not that big of a deal, so long as you have knowledgeable folks to work with on your network team.

jared_f
Valued Contributor

Haven't gotten into load balancing recently. However, I would not recommend the Mac mini's for Tomcat. What is your main JSS running on? Would VMs be possible? The nice thing is you can have multiple nodes on one server and allocate resources as you need them.

Phantom155
New Contributor

Our JSS and Database are all on one server.
Windows Server 2016
3.1 Ghz Intel Xeon (I don't remember how many cores it has)
96 GB Ram
10Gb uplink

Our System Admin runs our VM environment and he is refusing to let me use a vm at this time.
I believe our previous Mac Admin spec out the server and there was some miscommunication between him and Jamf on how to utilize the server. I assume jamf figured he would have used it as a VM (definitely have enough ram and processing power to carve out a few VMs into it). He just installed it on the server and now we have all sorts of slow down issues that would be fixed with upscaling. I inherited our system from our previous Mac Admin and just trying to figure out this mess. But if you have any other questions about our system I will get you that info.

Sorry for the rant. It's a little frustrating...