Using client machines as resource servers

Any machine in the NIM environment can be a resource server. In simple environments, the NIM master is usually used to serve all the NIM resources.

Defining resources on client machines can be beneficial for the following reasons:

• Disk space limitations on the NIM master may prohibit the storage of all the resources on a single machine.
• Resource usage may be heavy, and communications and data access bottlenecks could occur if all the resources were served by a single machine.

  For example, if you use NIM to install 200 machines on 5 different subnets, you could have a set of resources created and available on each subnet. Each set of resources would be used to install the machines on the same subnet. In addition to distributing the workload among several resource servers, this would also reduce the network traffic across the gateways between the different subnets.