What's running your JSS?

[#1]

I'm curious about something...

New (or not so new) Casper admins: now that Apple has done away with the
Xserver, what are you running your JSS on? At my place, we have a
relatively small Casper deployment - around 47 Macs in two locations ­ and
have our main server hosted on a MacMini Server with another MacMini Server
as a remote distro point. Both servers use the secondary 500 gb HDD as the
CasperShare and do a simple TimeMachine backup of the primary server to keep
it backed up. While this isn't super fancy, it works. I'm curious as to
how the bigger deployments are configured and what your experience has been
­ especially with non-Mac distro points.

Thanks
DS

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dave Simon
Director, Media Engineering and Operations

T +1.415.808.3594 | F +1.415.808.3535 | C +1.617.908.5043
600 Harrison St € San Francisco, CA € 94107

PRN | media where & when it matters

[jszaszvari]

We were running it on a Xserver but I found some performace issues.

I also want to keep mysql up to date, and not use the version compliled for mac.

On the Xserve I had bad mysql table locking issues, and CPU load was always very high.

I migrated our JSS and database to a Ubuntu linux machine and it has been running like a dream.

Our distro points still sit on the Xserve with AFP access but the JSS and database is run from a linux machine. I want to migrate the datastore as well soon.

John

[Matt]

We run ours on Windows 2008R2 boxes. We get excellent support from both Microsoft, VMWare, and JAMF. Since we moved to Windows VM's its been a delight. The systems work flawless and we get proper enterprise support. I'm so glad we ditched the vaporware Apple "Enterprise" solutions.

[jszaszvari]

| vaporware Apple "Enterprise" solutions.

This man speaks the truth :)

John

[Matt]

I would seriously reconsider the Linux move. We did a POC with Linux and Windows 2008R2 and the Windows machines were flawless (running in VMware.)

[jszaszvari]

Unfortunately there's no way I would run Apache Tomcat on a Windows Machine

Ours is a VM as well, Snapshotted daily.

I used to run apache tomcat in windows and had huge scaling issues ( See http://www.webperformance.com/library/reports/windows_vs_linux_part1/index.html )

I can't think of a better task for a Linux box, A database driven web app.

(Not a windows hater, Have over 30 Windows VM's here as well)

John

[dhowell]

WE have 2 JSS. Both run great with no issues and we have 9000 desktop clients and presently 500 Mobile clients

Our Desktop JSS is on a Xserve and has 6 Redhat Distribution Points
Our MDM is on a Redhat VM and since it is a MDM no Distribution Points needed.

D. Trey Howell ACMT, ACHDS, CCA
trey.howell at austinisd.org
Desktop Engineering
twitter @aisdmacgeek

[jarednichols]

We're currently on 10.6.7 on a Nahalem XServe. With Apple's latest anti-Enterprise movements we're moving over to RHEL on a Dell R710. It's been ordered and is on the way. I've run Proof of Concept in an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS VM and it worked just fine. The upshot is also that our Server Team does Linux so I can get out of the server management game. Haven't planned on when the cutover will be, but it'll likely be gradual. Reposado first for all SUS duties and then we'll move all the clients over to the new JSS.

j
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[bkvines]

Dave,

We're not all that big -- about 200 Mac desktops -- but we're rather spread out.

We've got a 2009-era Mac mini acting as our JSS at our main site. We have seven remote sites, each with its own Mac mini acting as a local repo for that site.

The Mac mini which acts as our JSS is one we converted to "Server" mode -- we replaced the optical drive carrier and aluminum case of a standard mini with the "server" parts, and so it has two 500 MB HDs mirrored inside.

The remote Mac minis are all standard-issue non-Server Mac minis, simply because they're just repos.

Sometimes the JSS seems slow on the Mini, but it's livable.

--
Bryan Vines
Systems Administrator
Watts Guerra Craft LLP

[ernstcs]

We have around 500 systems here. We currently run all services from two XServes.

One serves as the JSS and primary distribution point. The other serves as a backup distribution point and hosts our Netboot and ASUS services.

We copy netboot images to both servers so I can quickly setup Netboot on the other if there is a failure, and the same goes for the JSS.

I'm hoping to run these XServes through to next summer. During the course of the year we'll see what our options are going forward. In order to keep Apple based services like NetBoot and ASUS I'll still need to keep a Mac Server around. At that point I'll likely and reluctantly invest in at least one of the revised MacPro's when they come out, unless OS X Server is allowed onto another supported hardware vendor or in other VM software not on Mac hardware. As for running the JSS I'll likely need to go to Windows if the previous sentence doesn't happen since there are more people in our group that are comfortable with that.

Craig E

[Jeff-JAMF]

My JSS is running on a 2008 xServe (OS X 10.6.7, 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel
Xeon, 8 GB RAM). I'll keep running the JSS on this box as long as I can.

Jeff Johnson
Technology Coordinator
Glendale-River Hills School District
Glendale, WI 53209

[RobertHammen]

JSS for the main company (~100 clients) is running on a 2006-vintage Mac Pro. Also runs NetBoot, DHCP, SUS et. al. Will stick with it for another year or two and see what's available at that time.

JSS I manage for a Fortune 50 company (250+ clients) used to run at Amazon EC2, it's now running temporarily on a Mac mini server while we spin up a virtualized Win2K8 server/get all of the firewall rules and DNS translations in place to make it accessible from the outside world.

I installed an initial config this way and it was a PITA getting Tomcat, Java, IIS et. al. all configured (not to mention when I was doing it earlier this year, the JAMF document was changing weekly). Glad JAMF is doing installers for both Mac and Windows servers for 8.2...

--Robert

[dkucmierz]

3 Dell R610's running Red Hat 6 clustered for tomcat. Mysql still on our2009 xserve (8core 24gb ram). 13k osx clients and growing.

--

David Kucmierz
Mesquite ISD Technical Services
972.882.5506