Re: Remote Boot Windows XPE?

You got the right answers from Sean however I want to warn you that PXE boot
for that number of clients, assuming you want to boot them simultaneously,
is dreadfully slow. I boot up to 72 clients from a 2GHz Pentium-M server
and the boot process saturates the server CPU after about the 5th client.
This leaves my gigabit link to the clients greatly under-utilized. I think
the TFTP server provided with the server package is the culprit and it would
be great if someone had the time and interest to improve that server. It
would also be nice if MS would improve remote boot support in other ways.
For example, your remote boot client requires the RamDisk component. I have
a fairly light 90 MByte image but I allow another 60 Mbytes for temporary
files (lots of log files) so the SDI image ends up to be 150 MBytes. Using
remote boot, the entire 150 Mbytes must be downloaded even though 60 MBytes
of space for file creation has nothing in it. If you require a swap file,
which you will if you want to do performance monitoring, then your empty
swap file also becomes part of the baggage that you must download. Maybe
this becomes less of a problem if the FS is NTFS and you use compression
(don't know) but I have reasons for using FAT.

There is a faster remote boot solution available from Ardence but there are
a couple of technical factors that made that solution unsuitable for me.

Luke

"Benjamintohc" <Benjamintohc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C765DB2E-47CE-4A75-90A6-EDB24CFD3712@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I need to boot 32 diskless clients on my test setup into Windows XP/E
through
network boot. Is this possible?

I cannot install Windows into any of the 32 x86 clients due to space
contraints but I can have a PXE server available.

Is this possible? What charges ($$$) am I looking at?

Thanks in advance folks


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Remote Boot Windows XPE?
    ... More than 10 clients with a relatively large image and 100Mb network is a not a big ... I think the TFTP server provided with the server package is the culprit and it would be great if someone had the ... It would also be nice if MS would improve remote boot support in other ways. ... you will if you want to do performance monitoring, then your empty swap file also becomes part of the baggage that you must ...
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