Hey Guys,
My organization is preparing a standardized MDT implementation to replace our ad-hoc Ghost imaging, and I'm trying to decided on the OS to use for the central MDT server. We've had a test lab setup for the last couple weeks, and I've had good success designing the solution around Server 2008 R2-WADK(8.0)-MDT 2012U1 running from a HP i5 based desktop. We've gotten the green light to go ahead with implementation and ordered a new Proliant server to host MDT.
I'm at the stage of ordering the OS licensing now, and the quote we got back from our vendor indicated that we would be purchasing a Server 2012 license. Rather than just use the downgrade rights (we have no 2012 in our environment) I decided to check and see if there were any role improvements that we could benefit from.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh974416.aspx mentions performance improvements for multicasting, PXE booting, and the native ability to run without AD authorizations. All of these would be useful for our environment, so I decided to rebuild the test server with Server 2012 and see how it worked. I mirrored the configuration of 2008 R2 test box, but have run into performance issues while multicasting to test clients.
For reference, the previous server was setup to run DHCP, DNS, SQLExpress, WDS, RRAS (or whatever 2008 R2 called it) as LAN routing only (in order to multihome - we required 2 NICs attached to separate networks), and Hyper-v. MDT/WDS/DHCP/DNS/RRAS/SQLExpress ran on the bare-metal install, Hyper-V was used to host the virtual machine that is the "base image" and with the intent that DHCP and DNS would eventually move to a VM once we implemented on server hardware. Virtual NICs were used for each physical NIC. With that setup and a Cisco gigabit managed switch, we would get anywhere around 25-35MB throughput multicasts, using 2 stream autocasting (Slow/Fast). I figured this should be faster, but chalked it up to the fact we were running it on desktop hardware. These numbers were after messing around with the apblocksize and max window values in the registry.
I did a clean install of Server 2012 today and replicated the setup, reimported the deployment share and database, and tried some deployments. On the exact same hardware, with the same network configuration, throughput dropped to a total of 20-22MB for a single"Fast" client and 10MB per a stream when using 2 stream autocasting. It also did not skip caching the WIM as was outlined in the WDS improvements article. I tried disabling the virtual NIC for the interface facing the imaging LAN, but there was no noticeable change in speeds (maybe a MB or two).
So, does anyone know if there is a way to enable the direct application of the WIM file as outlined in the WDS 2012 doc, and are there any suggestions for ways to improve performance specific to Server 2012? I'll get in a take a look at the apblocksize and related settings tomorrow, but I don't remember the out-of-the-box performance on Server 2008 R2 being this low.
As a note, I saw the reports of issues with SMBv3, we are deploying Windows 7 so I am not sure if that is the problem. I guess it's a possibility since the wim transfer occurs within WinPE4.0, which is based on 8, but I am not sure if that uses SMBv3 or not.
Thanks for any help or suggestions that you may have.
My organization is preparing a standardized MDT implementation to replace our ad-hoc Ghost imaging, and I'm trying to decided on the OS to use for the central MDT server. We've had a test lab setup for the last couple weeks, and I've had good success designing the solution around Server 2008 R2-WADK(8.0)-MDT 2012U1 running from a HP i5 based desktop. We've gotten the green light to go ahead with implementation and ordered a new Proliant server to host MDT.
I'm at the stage of ordering the OS licensing now, and the quote we got back from our vendor indicated that we would be purchasing a Server 2012 license. Rather than just use the downgrade rights (we have no 2012 in our environment) I decided to check and see if there were any role improvements that we could benefit from.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh974416.aspx mentions performance improvements for multicasting, PXE booting, and the native ability to run without AD authorizations. All of these would be useful for our environment, so I decided to rebuild the test server with Server 2012 and see how it worked. I mirrored the configuration of 2008 R2 test box, but have run into performance issues while multicasting to test clients.
For reference, the previous server was setup to run DHCP, DNS, SQLExpress, WDS, RRAS (or whatever 2008 R2 called it) as LAN routing only (in order to multihome - we required 2 NICs attached to separate networks), and Hyper-v. MDT/WDS/DHCP/DNS/RRAS/SQLExpress ran on the bare-metal install, Hyper-V was used to host the virtual machine that is the "base image" and with the intent that DHCP and DNS would eventually move to a VM once we implemented on server hardware. Virtual NICs were used for each physical NIC. With that setup and a Cisco gigabit managed switch, we would get anywhere around 25-35MB throughput multicasts, using 2 stream autocasting (Slow/Fast). I figured this should be faster, but chalked it up to the fact we were running it on desktop hardware. These numbers were after messing around with the apblocksize and max window values in the registry.
I did a clean install of Server 2012 today and replicated the setup, reimported the deployment share and database, and tried some deployments. On the exact same hardware, with the same network configuration, throughput dropped to a total of 20-22MB for a single"Fast" client and 10MB per a stream when using 2 stream autocasting. It also did not skip caching the WIM as was outlined in the WDS improvements article. I tried disabling the virtual NIC for the interface facing the imaging LAN, but there was no noticeable change in speeds (maybe a MB or two).
So, does anyone know if there is a way to enable the direct application of the WIM file as outlined in the WDS 2012 doc, and are there any suggestions for ways to improve performance specific to Server 2012? I'll get in a take a look at the apblocksize and related settings tomorrow, but I don't remember the out-of-the-box performance on Server 2008 R2 being this low.
As a note, I saw the reports of issues with SMBv3, we are deploying Windows 7 so I am not sure if that is the problem. I guess it's a possibility since the wim transfer occurs within WinPE4.0, which is based on 8, but I am not sure if that uses SMBv3 or not.
Thanks for any help or suggestions that you may have.