[fog] Any LARGE Fog deployments out there?

[A5Ben]

I currently use WDS on a WAN with 22 remote locations (schools) and it works "fairly" well. I started looking into Fog to get the ability to schedule imaging of remote computer labs. I'm trying to envision a Fog system that would utilize central Fog server but would allow clients to receive their image from their local Fog storage server.....

 

Does anyone know if this is even possible or would I need a for server (web gui) at each site and maintain them all separately?

 

Thanks!

Ben in SC

[A5Ben]

This thread: SourceForge.net: FOG - A Free Cloning Solution: Topic: Deploying Across a WAN

 

Describes exactly what I want to do but he got no replies....................

 

Ben

[morganw]

I think this would work in theory in terms of how the images would move around. You would make one storage group per remote site and just keep the central FOG server at your location. The master node for each storage group would sync to the other slave storage nodes and they would all be located at the remote site so no bandwidth issues there. I think that to get an image from you to the remote master node you would have to use cp to copy the image across, otherwise you would have to instruct someone at the remote site to do the upload for you - maybe what you want but I imagine not.

 

http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/images/7/79/StorageGroups.jpg

 

I think what may cause a problem is that I'm pretty sure the PXE boot process, imaging progress information, FOG service, and generally anything that references the database will want to speak to the main FOG server. You maybe could handle this through some kind of routing configuration across the WAN and I wouldn't expect there to be masses of traffic. Could be worth testing at least, but defintely not straight forward.

[A5Ben]

I think that the image replication will work out of the box, I read about a new process that handles that on the Fog server. I haven't deployed a second server yet to see if it will retain the TFTP/PXE boot processes but I don't think that it will from reading the user guides.

 

I suppose that the configuration could be modified to point to a central database server instead of the local one and that could make this all work the way that I want...... Time to do some testing I guess.

 

Thanks!

Ben in SC

[A5Ben]

Found an even better thread on their forums... https://sourceforge.net/projects/freeghost/forums/forum/730844/topic/3622667

 

Lots of work but what I need.... Maybe my working WDS system is better than I thought LOL....

 

Ben in SC

[morganw]

It's good that it's possible but I wouldn't relish the thought of reworking the code every time there is an update, although at the moment they are infrequent. Another complication might be that things like the service settings may require different values on different sites, and at the the moment parts of the service doesn't play nicely with Windows 7. If all your sites are identical it might be worth a go. The only other way I can think of doing it would be to run the main fog server as a VM on each site that is scripted to shutdown and syncronise it's disk images on request over the WAN - so you maintain one, then push it onto the remote sites. If one site needs exceptional settings then you start maintaining two VMs. Could be pretty fast using a delta transfer.

Like you say though, if WDS is doing the business I'd be inclined to stick with what works.

[A5Ben]

Well, even though WDS is working it has it's shortcomings.. For instance it would be great to be able to schedule imaging of computer labs. My WDS system is pretty slick as I use a PXE menu similar to FOG already that is password protected and branded for our district.

 

Maybe the designers of FOG will incorporate this hack into a future release.... Sure would make life easier.