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Symantec GhostCast Server performance when used as a VM

K

KapsZ28

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May 29, 2009
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So the company we use for DR informed us they will be decommissioning the server we have always run Ghost on. They offered to let use set it up on a virtualized server. Unfortunately we haven't received any of the hardware specs or how much memory, network, etc will be allocated to our VM. Actually we don't even know if it is VMware, or something else.

But what I am trying to find out is if anyone has used ghost in a virtual environment to deploy images? If so, how does it perform? We would be using multicast to deploy at least 10 images at a time.
 
I have never used Ghost Server on a VM. But off the top of my head, some concerns I would have would be if I'd get a dedicated NIC for the ghost server VM. You dont really want to bog down other servers whenever you start a ghost session. Also, HDDs to split up the different images. Reading 10 images at one time off one hdd is going to slow things down. If using RAID, split them up among different arrays if possible.

If you are able to get good hdd reads, and a dedicated NIC, then I would expect the performance to be just fine.
 
I have used WDS inside a Hyper-V VM and it has worked great.
We have local WDS servers at each site so we are not multicasting across our WAN. (I prefer autocast anyway)

I haven't tested ghost, but WDS works great.
 
The dedicated NIC is definitely a good point. We really need to know the hardware specs and what they would be allocating to us. I was just hoping someone has actually done it before.
 
You most certainly will need a dedicated NIC. And a static IP for that matter

I do not know how large the images are, but you will still probably need to split them over different HDDs if you plan on using them at once.
 
Ghost is pretty lightweight. It will perform fine through a virtual machine, but they'll have to setup the NIC to work correctly.
 
J-Will said:
I do not know how large the images are, but you will still probably need to split them over different HDDs if you plan on using them at once.
Click to expand...

That makes sense and now I know why we have performance issues at our office when casting multiple images.

Since this is a VM session, I guess we would need to have them specify multiple drives, but they would have to be pointing to different drives on the VM server? Rather than creating a bunch of drives all on the same volume.
 
In a RAID 5 configuration, does creating separate volumes or arrays make any difference in performance? Or it doesn't because you are still technically using the same hard drives and read/write heads?
 
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