Tag Archives: K2000

When your K2000 disk starts getting near to capacity (that is, over 90%) the web UI (Administrative Console) may become slow or even unresponsive. Now I know this may be repetitive for all of you who have gone through our JumpStart Training or seen other articles about maintaining your appliances, but we really want you to pay  attention to the amount of free space on your appliance. Accidentally overfilling it will lead to some serious problems, up to and including “bricking” the appliance. If you aren’t currently or considering using Offboard storage to solve this dilemma, please read on. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, read on.

When an upload begins, whether capturing a user state, an image, uploading an application or source media, building a boot environment, or adding drivers- the K2000 does not verify that it has enough space to complete the task. It begins the task and locks up once all the disk space is utilized. This is bad. Very bad. So to avoid that uncomfortable situation, here are a few things you can do to keep things neat and tidy.

In previous Kare & Feeding Articles and presentations we’ve advised that you backup old components and remove them from the disk; this is still true. First, you most likely want to know how to backup (package) components. Go to Settings & Maintenance –> Package Management page and open “Export K2000 packages”. You can select the items you want to backup and click Export. Note that these files ( a PKG and corresponding XML) are exported to the \\k2000\restore share. Each package requires about 1.5 times the amount of space indicated on the Export page. Guess what; you can overfill your appliance by selecting a component to export that is the same size or larger than your remaining disk space. You can take backups a step further by scheduling the Restore share contents to be copied to an External Storage and automatically removing everything that was transferred, but you’ll still want to ensure that you have enough free space for that task as well.

What if you can’t back up because you don’t have enough space? The easy answer may be that the items you’ve already backed up are sitting in the restore share. You can free some disk space by removing the packages from the share. If you still don’t have enough room to backup, make sure that you have recently Purged unused K-image files. Deleting an image or source media from the box doesn’t remove the associated files; Deleting Images and source removes the entry  from the database only until the Purge action is ran manually. Go to Settings & Maintenance –> Appliance Maintenance–>Purge unused K-image Files. Have patience my friend… the nifty pie chart on the Home page only updates every 15 minutes. Whether deleting items or purging you will not see the results of your efforts right away.

Our suggestions for keeping your K2000 clean are as follows:

• Unused Images: Operating systems you migrated away from (Vista, XP, Mac OS X 10.5, etc), images you recaptured with newer versions of software and updates; pretty much any image you don’t plan to deploy. You may want to export these so that if you needed to re-import it for deployment at some future date you could. Don’t forget to purge once you delete it though!
• User States older than a few days: User profiles go stale fairly quickly after they are captured. Note that there are two options for User Profile backups, export it as a package or download the MIG file from the user state details page.
• Outdated source media: Once you have new media, for example Windows 7 SP1, you typically will want to delete old source media (Windows 7 SP0) and purge. Source media also uses data de-duplication on the K2000. Therefore removing it won’t give you as much space back because only the non-duplicated files are purged. However deleting OS media that is no longer deployed typically, such as XP when you only deploy Windows 7, will get you some space.
• Scripted Installs that used your outdated media: Note that you will have to remove the old Scripted Installations before you can get rid of the old media! You may want to back up a Scripted Installation in case anything happened to your box and you had to restore it, but once the scripted installation media has aged to the point where you replace the media of a newer version, it’s time to get rid of the old Scripted Installations as well.
• Inactive KBEs: When you build a KBE the previous one stays on the box until you remove it. KBEs typically are cumulative, you add drivers to the share, re-cache the share, and rebuild it to cover the latest greatest hardware in your environment. Only in rare cases would you build a KBE from which drivers were taken out of the boot environment. Starting in v3.4 you must also rebuild it whenever the password for the Driver/Share changes on the Settings & Maintenance > General Settings page. Therefore KBE typically isn’t a component that makes sense to have several available iterations of.
• Application tasks: Get rid of tasks with older versions of the software. When a new version of software comes out, you may want to just update the post installation task that contains the older version. This way you solve several items at once, you get rid of the old application file and you have automatically included the new one in all the Scripted Installation and System Images where the old one was assigned. If you created a brand new task, you’d be going through all your Scripted Installs and System Images pulling out the old task and replacing it with the new one. Likewise with unused tasks, you can see which Deployments a task is used in on the details page of the task.
• Drivers: Keep only the drivers for the operating systems you are deploying and remove (or archive off of the appliance) drivers that were used for retired or replaced models. Go to Library > Driver Feed and select the items you want to remove, then click Uninstall in the Choose Action menu.

Some of the disk space concern has been reduced or eliminated for many customers in K2000 v3.4 with the inclusion of Offboard storage. The Dell KACE K2000 Deployment Appliance, version 3.4, expands storage by substituting an external Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for the appliance’s internal storage.  It also expands RSA storage by using an additional virtual disk. When external storage is enabled, internal storage is no longer available. Check this article for more detail on that new functionality: http://www.kace.com/support/resources/kb/article/K2000-Storage-TechNote