First off, I am new to LDMS and I am working on the implementation for the first time, so please take that into consideration. Admittedly, it could be that I am confused on how the process works. We are using LDMS 9.0 SP3 and I am working on setting up HII for OSD. Currently the Driver Library is configured to point to the core server. If I try to save this however, it tells me that it needs to be on a preferred server. From searching I found that it is acceptable to make the core server a preferred server and I am working on setting that up. Currently, I have not configured any sources, replicators, or preferred servers. I realize that I may be going about configuration a bit out of order but I have some goals I am trying to meet.
A little background on our environment may help in answering my questions. We have two sites that will utilize LDMS, at one site there are roughly 60 client machines, and the second site has 40. We have 4 point-to-point t1's configured for load balancing and failover between the sites. Initially I am only worried about getting OSD working for the main site and will come back after the fact and work on getting the second site up and running. My plan is to utilize the core server at the main site as the location for my HII library as well as the locations for images and packages. At the second site, I would have a server configured as a preferred server as well as the replicator as I was told during training that I could do that without an issue.
When configuring the core server as a preferred server, it has a section where you define sources and this is where I am not sure how to procede. Since the core server will store all my source material (images, packages and HII library), should I go ahead and configure all these locations as sources in the preferred server considering these same shares will also be set as locations when I configure the core as a source? Wouldnt the replication service needlessly try to replicate this data and more importantly, would this cause a problem? Obviously the replication service will always find that this preferred server is always up to date since it is the source as well. I just have concerns that this may cause some other unintended problems.Has anyone done a similar configuration like this?
On that note, it seems that many people utilize seperate servers to hold the images, packages and HII library, rather than utilizing the core server. I assume this is due to having a large number of clients. Am I going about this wrong considering the number of clients we are supporting? Should we be running a seperate preferred server at our main site?
Thanks for the help and I welcome any suggestions with this configuration.
Rob