Hall, Ken (GTS) wrote:
The small addition of the read time for DDR is nothing compared to the
time required to install the packages over the network. That's at least
the same amount of reading, plus network time.
I agree about the problem of keeping multiple masters. We keep just one
per version, and use a first-boot process to install additional packages
via yum as needed, or let the admins install what they need manually.
It's still faster, by quite a lot. Unfortunately, I don't have time
today to run measurements, but our base system clone process takes less
than 30 minutes from beginning to end.
All this said, we have been seriously considering going to a kickstart
based method, but my experience with it has not been encouraging. Aside
from taking longer, it seems to be fairly fragile and requires more
manual effort. Our clone method consists of running a VM-based dialog,
waiting for the copies to finish (run asynchronously in a service
machine), and then autologging the new guest.
Are you using NFS to host the install tree? In some recent tests, I
noticed a huge improvement installing over NFS when tweaking the NFS
mount options (rsize, wsize, tcp instead of udp, timeout).
In the kickstart file, you'd specify something like this:
nfs --server=server.example.com --dir=/path/to/rhel5.3
--opts=tcp,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=20
These options help especially if there's a lot of traffic on the line.
The default mount options are UDP, with rsize/wsize=32768.
-Brad
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of
Rob van der Heij
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 9:16 AM
To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: Re: [LINUX-390] To kick or to clone ... that is the question
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Hall, Ken (GTS)<ken_h...@ml.com> wrote:
How could it be faster?
Cloning involves simply copying the disks, that's one pass with DDR.
Copying a disk requires reading and writing. Formatting just requires
(short) writes. Depending on your configuration, you may not notice
the extra resource usage in the elapsed time.
But it's probably more whether you spend the time while you're waiting
for it. Once you get into the business of holding several different
golden masters to copy from, things get more complicated.
Back then we used a very bare minimum that was copied to the new root
disk, and the required additional packages were added on top of it.
That approach allows for a stock supply of copied root disks ready to
use.
-Rob
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(919) 754-4198
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