[wds] Slow unicast imaging on new server

[LoyalHeretic]

Hi folks,

 

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas, because i'm stumped as to find a reason why our new WDS server is operating slower than it's older counterpart. As part of our migration to Server 2012 R2, i've built a new WDS server from scratch using MDT 2012, and after a few struggles it now connect, the boot image applies and it can pull down images nicely to a client. However, as we don't use multicast due to a few problems with implementation we tend to do unicast deployments to a single room at a time. When I came to test this on one of our rooms we found that it was taking 3-4x longer for the whole room than with our older 2008 R2 server. Network traffic appears nearly identical, if not faster than the older server, although i'm not sure if this is just the transfer of the boot image (which is much quicker, despite being a larger image).

 

I've tweaked the settings as far as I can to make them identical to the old server, it's built on the same structure in terms of it's VM and i'm at a loss to explain why it is pulling down drivers and images so slowly. Could this be a result of poor drivers not being installed? I've not added any new drivers to the boot image, so could it be that the older Win7 drivers are causing the slowdown? I assume that the boot image is using a Win8/8.1 architecture as opposed to the Vista boot image of our old server, but as it was able to PXE boot, I thought nothing more of it.

 

My only other thought is that I used an older version of the MDT, but I don't see how this would make any difference.

 

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated, my google-fu has failed me, and the only results I can find are multicast related.

 

Thanks,

 

Alex

[cpjitservices]

You got multicast enabled on your switches ?

[LoyalHeretic]

IGMP snooping is enabled across the board, but we're not using the multicast, each machine is taking a unicast stream from the server.

 

I let the machines finish their 4 hour image and they've booted into windows with no NIC driver installed, the drivers on this WDS server are near identical to our old one, which has no problem imaging the entire room in just under an hour.

 

At this point i'm convinced this is a driver issue with the new WinPE image (which i'm pretty sure is Win8.1 based) so i've added the latest chipset and NIC drivers to the boot image, but i'm still getting the same issue, i've even gone so far as to completely remove every other driver in the image and leave only the latest drivers for that particular model in the image, but it still persists in the same behaviour.

 

I'm now firmly convinced this is some kind of driver issue, possibly even BIOS related, but I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is the cause.

[clairehr]

How do you do your driver injection? If there drivers in the .wim and you are injecting drivers sometimes windows get confused. Do you inject the drivers in the task sequence?