Your multi-site setups - Best practices ?

Question

Hey there,

I successfully build a machine with OCS for testing.
Now I want to switch to a production state and I'm asking myself how to implement the machines the best way.

I'm a system engineer and serve a couple of companies of different sizes.


My company (around 10 computer devices + network devices / deployment & inventory needed)
-->

Serves round about 20 other companies (with different sizes)
-->

Company A (around 50 computer devices + network devices / deployment & inventory needed)
Company B (around 30 computer devices + network devices / no deployment needed, only inventory)
Company C (around 20 computer devices + network devices / deployment & inventory needed)
Company D (around 10 computer devices + network devices / no deployment needed, only inventory)
Company E (around 5 computer devices + network devices / no deployment needed, only inventory)
Company F (around 5 computer devices + network devices / deployment & inventory needed)
And so on.

I already red the wiki sites for multi-site setups 'Synchronization between OCS servers master/slaves' and the 'Using local proxy cache to deploy on remote network'


So my intention was to build a setup like that:


My company:
- OCS master server with collects all information from ALL other OCS slave servers for general overview
- OCS slave server for deploying and inventorying my company + the other smaller companies with few devices

Company A (many devices and deployment needed):
- OCS slave server for deploying and inventorying company A / injects data to OCS master server

Company B (many devices and no deployment needed):
- OCS slave server for inventorying company B  / injects data to OCS master server

Company C (few devices and deployment needed):
- uses the slave server of my company to inventory and deploy

Company D (few devices and no deployment needed):
- uses the slave server of my company to inventory


So in the end I have 2 servers on my site (WAN down: 200Mbit/s up: 40Mbit/s)
OCS master: gets OCS data from 10 other OCS slaves (can't deploy anything)
OCS slave: used for inventorying and deploy my company and around 10 other small companys.

And there will be around 10 bigger companies with each having their own slave servers for inventorying and deploying.
These servers will then report there data to my OCS master server.



Make this sense and is this practicable?
Should I use proxy somewhere?
How you guys do a multi-site architecture like this?
Are there any rules or hints about the amount of devices and the needed WAN connection?



Thank you for helping (and sorry for my bad English).

Answer 1

Hello,

What machines are runnung local servers? Physical or some Virtual?
I use an OPENVPN network for communication (there are 100 PC's in about 20 Companies in multiple locations and  one big company with there own OPENVPN network with 160 PC's in 40 locations connecting to there own OCS server via OPENVPN network), this is the most secure  and quite easy way to connect all servers without making any thing like a proxy servers :)

If you are interested I can help you to configure one :)

Up to your connection it depends what you are gona do using OCS.

If you wish to use a deploy service for installing new software every day I suggest above 300Mb but if you wish to do only a data collecting it does not need much, esspecially that you can set connecting interval in OCS. I have go a GSM with about 50Mbit connection without external IP address at home and I collects data from all mentioned PC's via OPENVPN client and the OCSserver is a USB stick installed Ubuntu on a silent HP Thin client for 10$ :)

So you see OCS doesn't need much to work.......