2.3. Selecting A Machine To Use As An Image Server

Because SystemImager uses other network services such as DHCP, an existing server that provides these services often makes a good choice for an image server. In addition, the image server you choose needs to have enough disk space to hold the images you want to deploy. SystemImager stores images as an uncompressed directory structure, so a quick analysis of the disk usage on your golden client will give you a good estimate of the space required on the image server. If you plan to do multiple simultaneous image updates, poor processor performance on your image server can cause a bottleneck.

An alternative scalable and reliable method to break the bandwidth and performance limits of the image server is the BitTorrent transport. With BitTorrent the upload bandwidth of the clients can be used to distribute the images among the nodes exploiting the advantages of the peer-to-peer networks. For more informations see http://wiki.systemimager.org/index.php/BitTorrent .