Currently we are using DS 6.8 sp2 on Server 2003 R2 virtual machine. I am testing out a POC with DS 6.9 SP4 on Server 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 sp1. We use the DS exclusively for XP HII client imaging, with the master clients on a VM. We use DOS for PXE.
Here is the situation:
When pulling a new image it is taking over 7 hours when it used to take less than 45min. When deploying that image it is taking 1 1/2 hours when it used to take about 45min. When I first started working on HII over a year ago, I had issues with excessive image pull times and found a thread that said the master clients and the DS needed to be on the same ESX server. Moved them over and didn't have any issue until attempting to use the new POC virtual machine.
I have tried every combination of virtual NICS (flexible, vmxnet2, vmxnet3, e1000) with no change in time. I found some articles on TCP tuning and Server 2008 performance tuning. I verified the NIC had the following enabled; Checksum offload, Segmentation offload, TCP offload engine and Receive-side scaling. I disabled the Windows Scaling Heuristics, disabled the TCP Auto tuning and disabled the Network Throttling Index. These had no effect. I have a few more settings in the documents to try but I wanted to get a post up to see if anyone else is having these issues.
I can appreciate that many of you are using WinPE and although I may end up having to switch my PXE, I am looking for information specifically for this type of configuration (HII master and DS on virtual machines, ESX, and DS 6.9 sp4 on W2k8r2 with SQL 2008) with DOS and what performance you are experiencing.
Thank you in advance for your assistance!