Re: Remote Boot Windows XPE?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance


With RBS the image gets downloaded and executed in RAM (RAM disk), not to disk.

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Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental Toolkit
"Luke Alcatel" <luke@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:OEXWTdeNIHA.3916@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.

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=========
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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