Re: Remote Boot Windows XPE?

Seems like my explanation was not clear. Certainly the XPe image gets
downloaded and executed in ramdisk but my discussion and concern is the
performance of the RBS server which gets the SDI image from a disk file. I
was wondering if putting that file in a ramdisk on the RBS might improve the
otherwise woeful performance of that server.

Luke

"Sean Liming (MVP)" <sean_liming@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e1bhOFfNIHA.5360@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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

--
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.

--
=========
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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