[wds] Deployment taking 15 or more hours to complete

[dylanduffy]

Hi

 

We are running a WDS Server (2008) and trying to re-image some of our laptops but it's taking 15 hours or so

 

Any idea?

 

Dylan

[tigerstar]

Are you deploying lots of clients at once? Unless you're using multicasting, every additional client you deploy simultaneously will slow down the others because they're all trying to fetch the image independently (e.g. 20 clients deploying a 20GB image will be 400GB, and if there's a 100Mbps link somewhere between your WDS server and wherever you're deploying the clients, you're looking at a transfer time of 10 hours or more). I had this problem deploying Windows 7 in an external building last year - while all the switches in our main building and server room are Gigabit, the older gear in the outlying areas was just daisy-chained at 100Mbps, introducing a severe bottleneck and meaning I could only deploy 5 or so clients at once else everything slowed to a crawl.

 

To make things go faster, you've got a few choices:

* Set up a multicast transmission (done via the WDS server console).

* Deploy only a few clients at once in batches. Slower, but at least you're not waiting overnight for everything to finish.

* Ensure your WDS server and clients are only connected via Gigabit ethernet or faster.

[free780]

Stop using WDS as the solution. Use MDT. Use a thin image. Enable multicast buy make sure your network has the necessary settings configured otherwise multicast traffic will flood your network. Don't perform multicast over wan links either.

[caffrey]

I found it can depend on the NIC thats installed, the nvidia ones were really slow and some realteks are bad too

[strawberry]

How big is the image?. Is it thin/fat/hybrid? What are the network connections like between server and client?

[DMcCoy]

I found it can depend on the NIC thats installed, the nvidia ones were really slow and some realteks are bad too

 

Nvidia NICs all seem to be fundamentally broken, to image you need to boot WDS at *100Mb* then switch back to 1Gb when it switches from PXE to booting windows. MDT uses WDS anyway...

 

If unicast is this slow, I can only imagine multicast being even worse (usually they just drop out and switch to unicast). Some laptops I helped image recently were just very slow with the Win PE drivers, although the boot image was 8.1 boot.wim.

 

 

At the end of the day you can spend ages testing everything, but some laptops are just bad (iirc the really slow ones had those terrible letters A c e and r on them).