RHEL7 kickstart performance
I've been trying to get my Satellite 5.6 Kickstarts adjusted for RHEL7. In the process, I've noticed that the kickstart process seems to take about twice as long. Granted, my package count has increased from 1200-ish to 1400-ish. On RHEL6.5 a complete install took about 20 minutes. Now it seems that "Starting package installation process" alone takes around 15 minutes and then pack installation itself takes another 20 minutes.
Has anyone else noticed this? Is it to be expected?
Responses
Hi Tim,
The behavior you are describing is not expected and known to happen.
It might be related to a general performance problem or maybe something else within your satellite or kickstart.
Thus, may I suggest to file a support case with Red Hat Technical support to have them take a look at your problem in more depth and help you resolve the problem?
Cheers,
Si
Guru
2135 points
Just in case this is relevant:
I noticed a big time discrepancy in our kickstart performance when I installed one of the rare phyiscal hosts on our estate. This kickstarted in around half the time.
After a good deal of digging around, I found the cause for the delay was the installation of VMwareTools on our virtual guests.
I only mention in case you're looking at virtual deployments and there's some significant difference in the virtual tools/kernel combination that you're using.
I've been kickstarting RHEL7 boxes in KVM guests on my laptop and they seem to zip by in similar time to the RHEL6 guests. I've not timed a RHEL7 vs RHEL6 install, on my laptop however.
Red Hat
Guru
1638 points
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Guru
6222 points
Hi Tim,
The few installation I have done on KVM guest I do not notice a slower installation (longer installation time) then a RHEL 6.5 installation.
Kind regards,
Jan Gerrit Kootstra
We install a lot of virtual machines for students, and I noticed that our installation script (which uses ftp to install a new VM from a repo on an existing VM) indeed takes about twice as long to install a 7 VM as it does for a 6.5 VM. I noticed, however, that when I installed on metal (whose installation uses nfs instead), the difference was not nearly as noticeable. When I switched to NFS for our VM installations the difference in installation time (between 6.5 and 7) dropped dramatically. (A 7 VM installation across a virtual network on the local machine (which is indeed slow) dropped from 75 min to 22.)
Guru
6863 points
I noticed the same thing (slowness) - my next step is to mess with the SElinux settings to see if that speeds things up. I may also pass in speed/duplex settings to anaconda (which I hadn't thought to check while I was kickstarting before).
We're still on 6.6 I wish we could see even the worst times people have posted here! Our kickstarts take 2-3 hours to get to the initial logon screen. Every once in a while we see one complete in around an hour, but that is very rare and we have yet to understand why.
Seeing this same issue on VMs. The package install process is very slow compared to a RHEL6 installation.
Pro
730 points
Hi,
still the same behavior - kick-starting RHEL7 takes 2-3 times longer than RHEL6 using the same KS template - the template has been slightly changed to be compatible with RHEL7.
It seems the initial steps take similar amount of time, the first step which takes significantly longer is the Performing post-installation setup tasks.
The tested versions are 6.7 and 7.2.
Double-checked by deploying identical versions of CentOS, but there is no difference, so it must be something in the Anaconda...
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