KACE Product Support

When you run a VM, the client and host share the same NIC - so the Windows 7 host is going to limit the VM's potential a bit... You've also got host OS overhead on the bus, and the client system's bus has to process and write data while it's accessing the image. 40Mbps doesn't sound slow to me, but we're still on 100Mbps LAN speed. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the RSA has a virtual 10/100 card.

Seems like I remember hearing something in a different thread a few months ago about the boot environment being the bottleneck; if memory serves... some drivers added into the boot environment didn't support more than 100mbps, so some people would see slower network connections after the boot environment loaded but that still doesn't explain your 40mbps. I think this was mainly on x64 systems, but no reason the same issue couldn't happen on any system. Could port throttling on your switches be slowing it down? Keep in mind also that K2 is a *file-based* imaging solution, so every file is a new network connection basically, so full network utilization is rarely reached. Without more detail on your network configuration and images- Smaller images or scripted installations would be my best recommendation on improving speed (assuming there are no network issues at play here). Scripted installations are more flexible, more efficient, and run much faster. In general I can do nearly twice as many machines in half the time with a scripted install of Win7 compared to system imaging.

If the VM is updated to version 7, you can select the intell 1000 nic.

Corey, What do you mean the VM updated to version 7? The HOST OS of vmware server is Windows 7 64bit. It is connected to a 1000mbps Cisco LAN which I'm fairly certain is not the bottleneck. IF I transfer a ISO from the Host Windows 7 to my laptop sitting next to the laptop being imaged I get around 800mbps.

I realize with the file based net connections it is going to take a little longer but 40mbps seems really slow!. I would love to do the scripted installs however the problem is we have about 20 apps we want to build into the Image. I have silent installers for all of them so I suppose I could script them in as post install tasks but didn't know what the most efficient way of this would be.

When you do scripted installs how long does it typically take? All our KBE's are 64bit as all new machines we are imaging have 4GB of RAM minimum so we want the W7 to be 64bit installs everywhere. So I wonder if the nice is only syncing up at 100meg. I guess I could look at the network switch while the PC is imaging to see if it negotiated at gig or 100meg. I'll try and do that tommorow but if you have any recommendations I would appreciate it!

I read thru alot of recommendations and powerpoints (Like the eddie bauer thing) and gather that doing some combination of scripts and system images would be best for us most like.

Thanks for your help!

Since we dont' have root to these RSA's I can't tell much but it does seem they will not sync up at 1GB even thou the host W7 OS is running at 1gbps. I changed in the "konfig" the autoselect to 1000mbps and then my network on the RSA would not work at all after the reboot. I toggled back to auto select and suspect it is running at 100mbps.

I also noticed a few things in the system message bootup:

Mar 1 04:04:08 GBRSA-TP kernel: le0: <AMD PCnet-PCI> port 0x2000-0x207f irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci2
Mar 1 04:04:08 GBRSA-TP kernel: le0: 16 receive buffers, 4 transmit buffers
Mar 1 04:04:08 GBRSA-TP kernel: le0: Ethernet address: 00:0c:29:78:12:7a
Mar 1 04:04:08 GBRSA-TP kernel: le0: [ITHREAD]

seems to be super generic driver for NIC..I did install the vmware tools.



Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: acd0: CDROM <VMware Virtual IDE CDROM Drive/00000001> at ata0-master UDMA33
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: Waiting 5 seconds for SCSI devices to settle
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: da0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: da0: <VMware, VMware Virtual S 1.0> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: da0: 3.300MB/s transfers
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: da0: Command Queueing Enabled
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: da0: 409600MB (838860800 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 52216C)
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: cd0 at ata0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: cd0: <NECVMWar VMware IDE CDR00 1.00> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: cd0: 33.000MB/s transfers
Mar 1 04:09:16 GBRSA-TP kernel: cd0: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present


Disk is only showing 3.300MB/s ???? is that right?

After reading :http://communities.vmware.com/thread/161486

I'm questioning my vmware install and/or RSA install?

vtphilk,

Yes, if you hard set the nic in konfig to 1000, and you had no network access then you are running on 100. Sorry.

To answer your other question, if you shutdown the rsa, and look and the vm settings (on vmware server its the column on the right), it mentions vm hardware version. By default this is set to 4, but can be upgraded to 7. Once you upgrade you have the ability to change the nic to an intel 1000. In fact, maybe it is because you only have a 100 nic assigned that you couldn't get access. See what version you are at and report back here.

Corey

Power State Powered On
Guest OSOther (32-bit)
VMware Tools Running

Some operations such as repairing or uninstalling tools may require you to mount the VMware Tools installer.
Mount Installer
Virtual Hardware Version Version 7

:( Man i wish it was that easy..looks like it is already on version 7. I know for a fact the nic supports 1000gb. This is a optiplex 780 it is running on that is brand new Intel nic

I'm trying to install ESXi on this desktop to see if that helps.. This is pretty much unusable as a RSA if we can only transfer data from the RSA at 3.3MB/s (30mbps). We have 200 pcs to deploy and then another 250 in a week or two.

WElp..after killing myself to get VMware esxi installed on this optiplex I got it back up and running. NIC is definitely running at 1gbps now so nic problem is resolved. However, damn scsi driver still showing 3.3MB/s. What gives..does anyone have these virtual appliances running better than 40mbps ?

After starting to test I am seeing when I do 4 deployments from a single RSA that the speed is capping at 245mbps. Well 245/8 = 33MB/s. After reading around it seems there are some problems with VMWare and freebsd detecting drives at DMA 33 rather 100 or 133.

Since RSA is not supported in hyperv I am going to try it in virtualbox just to see if the integration drivers are any faster there. Since we are not allowed to have root on these RSAs I can't hack around to fix the dma but the KACE engineers really should look into maximizing the appliance! 240mbps might be fine when you are doing 1-2 images but we want to do like 20 / hour.