Re: Remote Boot Windows XPE?
- From: "Luke Alcatel" <luke@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 15:01:42 -0500
Another thought came to me. Maybe the problem with a large number of
clients is not really unicast but disk access. 36 or 72 clients can all be
getting different packets at the same time and depending on the quality of
system disk caching this may lead to a lot of disk access. On the other
hand, disk access wait time should not count as CPU time and my server
should not exhaust a 2GHz CPU when downloading 5-6 clients.
Nonetheless it seems that it would be interesting to see if the RBS
performed a lot better if the image were in a ramdisk. Unfortunately
disk-based Windows doesn't have a ramdisk and I don't know the quality of
existing products. Has anyone tried this strategy? Can anyone point to a
(preferably free) suitable ramdisk? Hint to MS -- it might be a great idea
if there was an option for the RBS default image to be memory cached by the
the RBS application.
Luke
"KM" <konstmor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e8k3WCeNIHA.748@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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
Just to confirm. Current RBS is unicast based. More than 10 clients with a
relatively large image and 100Mb network is a not a big help. Even on 1G
network it starts crawling.
The better implementation would be MTFTP (Multicast TFTP) or similar
protocol (suggested and filed to MS as a feature request a while ago). I
am not sure if it is on MS radar though.
--
=========
Regards,
KM
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
.
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