Slow Netboot from NetSUS appliance?

[MarkPetersonURM]

I'm curious to know how long it takes for other people to NetBoot from the JAMF NetSUS Appliance.

My NetBoot image is ~7.79 GB and takes about 3.5-4 minutes to get to a point that I can login to Casper Imaging.

The NetSUS server is in our datacenter, and I am connected by gig connections to the server.

With our old Deploy Studio NetBoot server, we were able to boot in under a minute. I know that DS trims their boot image to remove extraneous Frameworks and such.

Anyone have any success in slimming down their NetBoot image to get a faster boot time?

Is 3-4 minutes normal?

[Chris_Hafner]

Something is not quite right there. My NetBoot images are that large (Though they could be quite a bit smaller) and we're booting significantly faster than that. There are threads on preparing a minimal .nbi, but I wouldn't jump on that as the main cause of the issue. Sorry I don't have any more advice right off the batt. Just wanted to confirm that doesn't seem to be a normal loading time.

[frozenarse]

Is there also a difference between netboot and netinstall images? (I can't remember if DeployStudio cranks out netboot or netinstall....)

[Chris_Hafner]

When we were using DeployStudio I used NetBoot. I don't believe it could run NetInstall but I could be wrong.

[Chris_Hafner]

Have you tried booting it verbosely to see if the image is hanging?

[MarkPetersonURM]

I have, but nothing stood out as a glaring issue.

[franton]

3 minutes is about right for us. I'm wondering if there's any real way to improve on that.

[Chris_Hafner]

I get 1'35.5" on a standard gig connection and that seems a little slow from what I'm used to. That's going through at least 3 switches to reach the desk I tested it on this morning. The only time I get loading times like that is when there is a 100 Mbps connection in between.

[Chris_Hafner]

... I should point out that I'm not running a Netboot/SUS appliance. I have to figure that has a bit to do with it seeing as I've put quite a bit into those servers.

2 spanned Mac Pro's with Areca 1880ix-12 hardware RAID, running 3 stripped Cheeta 15k.7 drives w/both ethernet interfaces trunked on each unit. Just enough to saturate the 4 Gig uplink it has to the core switch.

However, watching the output from those units I'm not seeing any of that hardware actually being pushed beyond what a normal netboot box would be capable of. When we were running DeployStudio on a normal Mac Pro (separate HDD for nbi, but nothing else) my boot times were similar.

[tnielsen]

Did you guys just end up accepting those speeds? I'm having the same issue now with 10.9.4 netboot image running from the Server.app. The image is stripped down with ONLY auto login and casper imaging app on. Nothing else is installed, i cleaned out fonts/ppds. I watch the transfer speeds and it's only downloading the image at 10MB/sec.

I can trasnfer to the server from the same port at 80MB/sec. I'm wondering if I did something wrong? I am sharing using NFS btw.

[Chris_Hafner]

To update, I am now running our NetBoot server as 10.9.4 with the rather poor quality "server" app. That said, the general limit is disk I/O on the client side. AFP seems, actually, rather well utilized despite some of my initial reservations (seen in other threads). Actually, I just finished imaging ~360 student laptops with a single netboot server running 10.9.4 and a fresh .nbi (P.S> I do NOT go nuts stripping down .nbis). We had a great day. I was restricted to only 34 hard wired ports for imaging but we rotated through very very quickly and had the entire school imaged and inventoried in less than a normal business day.

What flavors of computers are you running? Units such as the ever popular mid-2012 MacBook Pro usually take between 17-20 MB/second on the slow end (this is during block transfer) and as high as 80-100 MB/Second. Anything with a flash drive tends to just run at the speed of the network connection.

BTW... the AFP servers I am running were using the entire 4GB/Second pipe we provided them to the switch in the area that we were imaging.

The question is, where's your bottleneck?

P.S> This is the 4th year in a row we've been imaging entirely using NetBoot and Casper Imaging. We were a DelpoyStudio and NetRestore shop prior to that.

[Chris_Hafner]

P.P.S my faster .nbi (created by JAMFs automated tool - not the automator action) take about 60 seconds to boot a small fleet of computers (between 30 and 40) my normal diagnostic (full sercive) .nbi taks about twice as long for the same number of computers. The first one is faster because it runs in RAMDisk.

[bentoms]

@Chris_Hafner, have you tried AutoCasperNBI with the modified rc.netboot?

This should create an NBI that uses a RAM Disk & I'm curious to see if t boots quicker for you.

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=11356

[Chris_Hafner]

In fact I have to great success. Didn't need to run rc.netvoot though. I ran it in production during our mass imaging. It's some good work but having disk utility would have been nice. I believe that's been added to them latest release? Sorry I'm not more verbose on the subject... It is Friday night!

[bentoms]

@Chris_Hafner, disk utility has always been on the NBI's.

[Chris_Hafner]

... Boy did I put my foot in it on that one. I was comparing it against "Casper netboot image creator" and used that one for some reason I don't remember off the top of my head. I'll have to check my notes on Monday., You guys are going to have to give me hell at the JNUC for that one *facepalm*.