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Create image to remote storage?


  • I'm having trouble using remote storage for the creation of images. Is this even possible or supported?

    The Com Server settings explicitly spell out "Local Storage Path", but does accept SMB paths.
    The Com Server log seems to act as if it is connecting to the share anonymously, rather than with the account and password used in the Storage Location section:

    2021-03-03 06:40:00,761 [10] ERROR Toems_Service.FilesystemServices Could not find a part of the path '\\********\******\images\test4'.
    2021-03-03 06:40:30,730 [10] ERROR Toems_Service.ClientImagingServices Could Not Create Image Schema
    2021-03-03 06:40:30,730 [10] ERROR Toems_Service.ClientImagingServices You can't access this shared folder because your organization's security policies block unauthenticated guest access. These policies help protect your PC from unsafe or malicious devices on the network.
    

    Removing this Windows constraint provides another error, indicating that the presumed credentials are not being used:

    2021-03-03 06:51:35,256 [8] ERROR Toems_Service.FilesystemServices Could not find a part of the path '\\********\******\images\test5'.
    2021-03-03 06:52:09,449 [7] ERROR Toems_Service.ClientImagingServices Could Not Create Image Schema
    2021-03-03 06:52:09,449 [7] ERROR Toems_Service.ClientImagingServices Access to the path '\\********\******\images\test5\' is denied.
    

  • This currently isn't supported. I know it's something that has changed for my CloneDeploy users. The easiest way would be to use iscsi for remote storage. It may possible to use UNC if you can get the permissions setup correctly, I've never tried it, remember it will be the application pool that IIS that is trying to connect to the share


  • @theopenem_admin I was able to work around it with an NFS share. Thank you!
    Straight SMB connections were definitely less fuss for my use case. Is the SMB Storage feature more for package delivery, or am I missing something?
    Seems that all image deploy traffic in Theopenem now goes through IIS, and my server is hit pretty hard with w3wp.exe CPU usage, limiting throughput.


  • Yes images are deployed using http now, but I've never noticed a hit to cpu or throughput even when using a vm with only 1 cpu. Serving the file shouldn't be that taxing. The SMB storage is only used when you are using more than 1 com server, it stands as the master replicating everything among the com servers local storage.


  • It does seem to hit the CPU more than i would have thought. I'll see if I can optimize this some how in a future release.


  • @theopenem_admin I'm admittedly using older (and slower) host hardware for my VMs. If I were on something more modern, I'm sure i'd be able to max out a gigabit connection.
    As it is, w3wp.exe monopolizes only two CPU cores, with about 250mbps of throughput to a 1gbps client. IIS is not my forte, so I haven't been able to figure out if there's any tweaks that can be made to improve throughput.
    (Theopenem was installed on a fresh Windows Server 2019 VM)


  • I've added an option in 1.4.4 to image direct to smb which will resolve this issue.


  • @theopenem_admin Thank you so much! After the last two days of testing and use, I'm seeing speeds saturating my gigabit connection.
    And reliability is now rock-solid. Before, creating images was extremely stressful, as timeouts and errors would happen more often than not, with no obvious notice. I can now create images without worry.

    Thanks again!