PXE Booting options

S

shinygecko

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 23, 2007
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We have a need to deploy an image made with acronis across 500 different PC's in about 12 different local subnets.

Good part is we have a central DHCP server running 2008R2 relayed across all subnets.

Have not dealt too much with PXE booting before but it seems to be the preferred method for large deployments.

Snapimage by acronis or FOG seem to be fairly popular.

What software are you guys using in this type of scenario?
 
finally getting off XP eh? :p

i'd use FOG, but that's because it's really the only one i'm familiar with
 
If you have a decent network with managed switches, WDS with multicast would work great and keep bandwidth down.

If you have any unmanaged switches near the core, multicast WILL kill your network.
 
All of the switches are cisco 3750G's with ip helpers of configured.

FOG seems good, but my only drawback i have is i can't seem to see how i can FOG to get the same functionality as WDS with "known" clients that have already been prepped in AD by manually adding the GUID.
 
If i install a separate WDS server in the same subnet as the DHCP server do i needed to relay DHCP Requests to both servers or just the DHCP Server?

The way i understand it is i relay DHCP traffic from other subnets to the DHCP server and that gives out the correct options for the client booting PXE to directly connect to the WDS server?


Sorry if this is a bit confusing.

:::UPDATE:::

Reading a little more into this it looks like either is a correct answer. I can route the broadcast traffic to both the dhcp and wds servers using 2 ip helper commands.

Or i can can route just 1 and use dhcp options.

MS seems to recommend routing the broadcast traffic to both destinations and they can each respond accordingly.
 
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