Multicasting with MDT 2010 and WDS

Today was the biggest test of my on-going experiments with MDT 2010 and WDS. With my new colleague, we deployed our customised Windows 7 image to our second computer lab. Unlike a few weeks ago when we did our first lab, this time we deployed the image to all the computers at once. I wanted to save time by not doing the computers in batches, but I also wanted to test out how the server would behave under a full load of 37/8 machines.

I’m pleased to say that despite being a positively ancient Pentium 4 class server, the server handled the load without issue. Here is a screenshot of the server delivering the image to 37 clients at once:

CPU Usage:

Network Usage:

The deployment was a success, with only 2 clients giving problems. One was a suspected RAM problem that was resolved by deploying the image again. The second machine received the image fine, but had an issue extracting it, which leads me to suspect that there could be bad sectors on the hard drive. I will give that machine my attention tomorrow and see if I can get it to image correctly.

Overall I am very pleased with the performance of the deployment. While I have pretty much got the nuts and bolts in place now, I plan to spend further time tweaking and tailoring the experience to reduce the number of screens that need information entered into. MDT 2010 has some quirks which can be annoying, and there are still many areas I need to get familiar with. I will continue to post my guide on setting up MDT and WDS once I’ve gone over a few more steps to double check my facts.