ghost server requirement

[tecknic]

Hi All,

What kind of servers would you recommend for a Ghost Corporate edition v 8.0. I have look at the minimum requirement at Symantec and what the give is very poor info. 486/16mb ram.... yeah sure!!! like W2k on a 166mhz/64mb ram. it runs but barely!

so my questions are:
1- what cpu / ram server would you recommend for the server be at an acceptable state. How about 400mhz /512mo ram?

2- When ghosting on the network. which machine does the process, the server or the client box? I tent to believe it's the client but I would like a confirmation. That would explain why the server side require so less power.

thanks,

Nic

 

[Seaspray0]

More to the point, you should be looking at the weakest link here... the network itself. I do believe a 100baseT network transfers data considerably slower than most computers built since 1995. Also consider what this is going to do to the bandwidth on the network during working hours. Do you think you will be getting complaints when you're pushing the network capacity sending an image?

You can see that the ghost service really doesn't need a goliath server. The biggest resource you need on that server is lots and lots of hard drive space for your images and optionally some memory to create a nice disk cache. If you want to be nice to the clients, and can do it, ghost your computers on a seperate network segment that isn't connected to the main network.

 

[tecknic]

Thanks for you answer. however you do not answer my quetion.
The Network is somewhat a bottleneck but not in this case. the backbone can take it no probleme as it is setup to 1g on each vlan with a max of 47 users per vlan. users are connected at 10mbs. Storage won't be an issue either and can easily be taken care of.

what concerns me is more the horse power requered to make it work in an acceptable fashion. I tent to belive the all the process is done locally and the server is there only to communcate with the client and give a deposit point.

so PII or PIII with 512mb or 256mb could easily do the job right?

nicolas

 

[kmcferrin]

Assuming that you're talking about using a Ghost multicast server, the server doesn't carry much of a load. It just reads the image file and broadcasts it to the workstations that are listening. Then the workstation writes the data to the client disk. There is nothing CPU intensive going on anywhere in the process.

The only possible exception is if your image files are compressed when they are created, in which case the client PCs will be doing a little more work to do the compression/uncompression. Even then, the client PCs (assuming that they were built within the past 5 years) are going to be able to process the data much much faster than they are able to receive it.

You mentioned that the network isn't a bottleneck, but then commented that the users only get 10Mb. I assume that you will have the client PCs being imaged on a 100Mb or even 1Gb connection, right? Because if you plan to push out images over a network where the client PCs only have a 10Mb connection you'll be very unsatisfied with the results.

When Seaspray0 said that the network will be the bottleneck he's not ignoring your question, he's telling you that the server specs will be irrelevant (though not in so many words). There's not even a requirement to run the "server" on a proper server. A workstation class PC works just fine and is much cheaper. The only real considerations are how much disk space you have available to store images and how fast the network is.

 

[tecknic]

thank for the info.

Yes pcs will be brought to a tech room connected to 100mb dedicated for that purpose.