Troubleshooting Casper Imaging Slowness

[rcurran]

JSSv8.62 running currently across 2 Ubuntu Server VM's. The connection to the JSS is being made over SMB. A 10GB image takes about 2 hours or so to complete. Would appreciate any tips for tweaking the configuration.

Thanks in advance

[jarednichols · Accepted solution]

Network speed?
Also, typically with VMs your bottleneck is disk I/O speed.

[rcurran]

Internal gigabit ethernet network.

I will check which tier the VM's are grouped in. Thanks for the tip!

[GabeShack]

What speed drives are hosting the Casper Share? I recently upgraded the from using internal drives on a mac mini server to a raided promise array connected via thunderbolt and saw my speed almost quadruple.

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

[rcurran]

The VM's are connected to the internal SAN. I am still waiting to hear back as to which tier they are running on.

Thanks for the tips so far!

[donmontalvo]

@rcurran Are you seeing the DMG do Block Copy? Or is it doing File Copy?

[GabeShack]

Good point. Also if you are serving them up I would compile the image when you have it set in the compressed format.

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

[rcurran]

@don

where would I find this information? during the imaging process?

@gshackney

I'm sorry I don't quite understand what you mean. My workflow started with pointing composer (using the Build OS Package option) to the drive i wanted to image, then moving that dmg image into Casper Admin and creating a new configuration for the image.

Thanks again for all the help

[donmontalvo]

Do you see this when Casper Imaging is laying down the DMG?

external image link

[rcurran]

Yes, I do. Sorry I am very new to Casper, obviously :)

[GabeShack]

During Imaging it will say Block copy or it will just run though all the packages you made installing them one by one. When you are in Casper Admin click on any configuration and you will see a button on the bottom right of the screen that says compile. When prompted I would recommend selecting "compressed" as this will make the imaging a little faster over networks. This will in essence create an "image" of all the packages you put in that configuration and will block copy it instead of installing them one by one. Be warned it usually takes a good amount of time to compile a configuration. Once compiled this will make things much quicker.
Hope that helps!

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

[rcurran]

Quick update, we installed vmware tools on the VM's which installed vmware-optimized drivers. Huge performance gain. Looks like my test machine should image now in about 20 minutes.

Thank you again for all the tips.

[rcurran]

Thanks Gabe! I will look into that.

[rcurran]

Does anyone know why it seems sometimes Casper Imaging wants to perform the block copy (which usually leads to a successful imaging process), and other times it goes the "Installing package" route (seems much slower)?

I haven't tried compiling any of the deployment images yet in casper admin.

Best

Update: checking off the erase option. d'oh :)

[Chris_Hafner]

That's exactly what they've been talking about. Compiling an image via Casper Admin will distribute it as a block copy. Without compiling the image Casper will install each package/image/script, etc individually. Obviously individually installing each item will take much much longer. On a high speed network without I/O bottlenecks we've easily imaged 30-45 computers w/25gig images in about 5-6 min. each.

[donmontalvo]

@Chris_Hafner I wondered about this, the stuff that is set to install on first boot will still cache within the compiled image and will run at first boot, no? How consistent/reliable is compiling an image? Anyone compiling an image that has CS6 stuff on it?

[GabeShack]

When you compile an image it makes a faux "Macintosh HD"(or whatever you title your disks) then it installs each piece one by one onto the faux "Macintosh HD" then it saves the full "Macintosh HD" as a disk image that it will then use to completely wipe a drive and restore from. Its a ton faster and will work fine no matter what you have installed onto the image. We do use it with CS6 without issue. Its almost like the old way of doing things where you make a perfect image and then push it out. Each time you make a change to the configuration though, you will have to recompile the image which can take awhile. (We use a machine with a solid state drive and a promise array raid 5 to speed up compiling).

The 1st run scripts all happen after the machine reboots and work normally as expected.
Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools