Ubuntu versions & server architecture

[MBrownUoG]

Hey folks.

Hopefully these are quick questions.

Our organisation is currently running Jamf 10.11, and I'm looking to move up to either 10.14 or 10.15 when that's out.

We currently have one Jamf database server on Ubuntu 16.04, and the Jamf frontend on another Ubuntu 14.04 box, along with one Windows Server 2016-based DP. All of these servers are VMs, and we currently manage around 650 Macs and around 600 iOS devices.

My question is whether it's worth having the Jamf database and the frontend seperated out on different servers for an organisation our size? Does anybody have any experience with the performance impact of running everything on one VM with a decent specification?

My other question is whether it's worth even trying to upgrade the servers from 14.04 and 16.04 up to 18.04, or is standard practice to just build another box and go from there?

As ever, cheers for any help/guidance!

[kerouak]

Hi mate,

I look after 4200 Devices
We have seperate VM's for each of our Webapps (curently 3) These sit behind a Kemp Load Balancer.
We have a seperate VM for the JamfPro Database
All distribution points are individual VM's running Ubuntu.

I personally recommend this setup, as performance would be impacted just building everything into 1 VM

As our estate grows, I can just go ahead and build andother JamfPro Server and add that as required.

Hope this helps some.

G'LUCK!

[crbeck]

If you're using VM's, I would absolutely use separate VM's for the database and Tomcat each for performance and reliability reasons. It makes it easier to scale performance if needed later.

If you were contemplating physical server purchases you could get away with one decently spec'd physical server but part of the advantage of using VM's is to be able to split up server workloads to more efficiently use processing/memory resources.

As for upgrading the server OS, I would not recommend upgrading on top of an existing install. Much better to just build another VM and copy any configs over. Personally I haven't had a good experience upgrading Ubuntu servers, even when sticking to LTS releases. I've only had one upgrade go bad where I couldn't boot until I booted into a Live USB and re-installed grub. Not so bad but still annoying. There's usually that feeling of flakiness after though even if it goes smoothly. Especially with you having to do two LTS jumps I just wouldn't bother trying to upgrade the existing install. Ubuntu desktop installs aren't so bad to upgrade for some reason.

[MBrownUoG]

Perfect, thanks for the answers both! I'll get building a couple of 18.04 servers then and look at best practice for shifting it all over.