OSD Capacity Requirements

itsmpro92 2023-09-06 20:32:39 UTC #1

The OSD documentation provides not guidance on the capacity requirements for an OSD server. What does the community recommend for disk, CPUs, and memory capacity?

MarianoF 2023-09-07 09:06:38 UTC #2

Hello @itsmpro92,
The OSD Server should be a machine with a good amount of RAM, cpu and disk but the OSD server capacity depends on your needs. I wrote some questions that can help you to evaluate your needs:

Consider that the OSD server is first of all a BigFix relay. Where will be this BigFix Relay in your BigFix environment hierarchy?
Do you intend to use the machine only for the OSD Server?
How many images will you store on the OSD Server? A setup image is about 5/10 GB, a capture image could be bigger.
How many targets will you intend to deploy at the same time?

I suggest a RAM not less than 8 GB, bigger would be better.
CPU should not be single core.
The disk size really depends on your usage.

Regards

itsmpro92 2023-09-07 16:05:53 UTC #3

Thanks for your comments and questions.

It seems to me that network capacity is also a consideration, since the images have to be transferred to the target(s).

JasonWalker 2023-09-07 17:02:34 UTC #4

Network capacity is usually the limiting factor in how fast the imaging will run. But it’s usually taken as something we just have to live with, it’s difficult to configure around it. Usually the most we can do is to distribute more OSD Bare Metal Server/Relays to get closer to the client network-wise, but often there are complications at the DHCP configuration to adding more of them.

Often the limitation over which you have more control is in the storage on the OSD server. Ideally it should have enough disk space to cache your OS images, and those can get pretty large so I usually recommend a terrabyte depending on your image count & sizes.

JasonWalker 2023-09-07 17:04:36 UTC #5

That said, if the PXE boot phase is taking longer than expected, that part of the transfer is done over TFTP and there are some tunings we can do for that, which I usually recommend. I’ve posted them here before if you don’t already have the info on tuning TFTP block size on the bare metal server, or TFTP block & window size on the WinPE engine configuration.

What I usually expect is two minutes or less for the WinPE image download & boot on a local gigabit link.

itsmpro92 2023-09-07 17:05:44 UTC #6

Thanks Jason. I have seen your TFTP configuration recommendations during my search for OSD info, and plan to make use of them.