Ghost Solution Suite

I am utiling 6 Netgear Prosafe gigabit (16 port) unmanaged switches for my network (star topology).  There is no need for managing any of the traffic thus far because it is purely for pc gaming.  I am attempting to Ghostcast (GSS 2.5) and I am finding that the data transfer is varing between 32 and 65 MB/min if I have more than 3 clients accepting the image at a time.  I have even tried starting several sessions on the same network with no improvement.  I have also tried one large session.  The sessions were using multicast...from what I understand about networking in order to multicast the network needs managed switches otherwise it turns into broadcast.

Does anyone have any ideas (other than adding a managed switch)...

For multicast to work properly you do indeed need switches that have IGMP Snooping enabled.

However, the speed you are running at does seem incredibly slow, so let's start by asking you to provide a LOT more information about your setup.

First of all, what version of Ghost are you using?

What operating system are you imaging?

What operating system are you booting the clients to?  DOS or WinPE?

Can you establish from the lights on either the workstation NICs or the switches, exactly what speed the NICs are connecting at?

Can you try a limited test where only the Ghostcast server and the client machines are present on a switch?  There are known scenarios when NICs in power save configuration can really slow down a network.

Just noticed that you have another recent thread relating to 82579 drivers and WinPE - is this the same environment you are getting very slow performance with?

First of all, what version of Ghost are you using? --GSS 2.5

What operating system are you imaging? --Windows 7 x64 Enterprise

What operating system are you booting the clients to?  DOS or WinPE? --WinPE

Can you establish from the lights on either the workstation NICs or the switches, exactly what speed the NICs are connecting at? --All are gigabit 

Can you try a limited test where only the Ghostcast server and the client machines are present on a switch?  --With my current setup I was able to get 3 machines to reach 1100 MB/min however this was only once (only these 3 machines were running a session).

Just noticed that you have another recent thread relating to 82579 drivers and WinPE - is this the same environment you are getting very slow performance with? --this is the same environment

Thanks.

Is it GSS 2.5 at build 2266?  If not, make sure you run liveupdate and update the server and clients.

I finally figured it out.  The issue was not the network at all.  The problem lied with the harddrives on the client machines.  There were error that were preventing the harddrives from running at top speed.  I would recommend running checkdisk prior to imaging "new" machines.  Once I identified bad harddrives and rebuilt them the problem disappeared.

Thanks everyone for you help!!