Deployment Solution

I have a seemingly unusual situation.
I'm using Altiris 6.9 SP4 to deploy multiple academic computer labs on several different subnets.  Preparing to, anyway.  I have a fairly powerful server with multiple NICs, one for each subnet.  What I want to do is have a PXE server that listens on all the NICs, or several PXE servers, one listening on each NIC.  

Is this possible/feasible without doing something silly like running multiple virtual machines just for the PXE servers?

Hallo Arcanum

I must admit i have never seen this done, and i really don't think it can be done since the PXE server installation hooks to 1 IP and only listens on that one.
If anyone have done this i would also like to know it, since it's valurable information =)

When saying that i would like to ask you a question.
What is the reason you can't do this the normal way.

What you need to have done is you need 1 IP helper from each subnet to your subnet where you have the PXE installed on.

Kind Regards
Morten Leth

It seems to work fine in our environment.  I must admit, however, that we only had two nics, on which we have nic teaming enabled.  We created virtual nics that sit on each of the subnets that it serves.  In order for that part to work,  you will need to set the switch port for trunking.

I'm not sure if it would work with several physical nics, but given the above scenario with virtual nics, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Sorry for the delay in responding.  It's a bit of a madhouse here lately.

The reason I'd prefer to have a single PXE server listening to multiple ports (or multiple PXE servers on the same machine) is that we're looking at potentially booting a lot of machines from PXE simultaneously.  On the order of 120+ machines.  There's a noticeable load speed hit as more machines boot from the PXE server, so I wanted to spread the load out by subnet since each subnet has approximately the same number of machines.

A set of trunked lines would be fine, actually, except the institutional IT organization has been resistant to setting up trunked ports in the past.

If you where actually able to install the PXE server on the same server and get your PXE environment working on multiple subnets it would still be the same PXE server you would contact.

So if what your actually trying to accomplish is to spread out the load of your PXE environments you would need more PXE servers, one pr. subnet.
But it would still be the same place you download your image if you don't do some redirection of your PXE boot images also, so you would simple move your bottleneck.

You in your PXE environments have some Variables to work with:
%ALTIRIS_PXE_IP%

This variable gets traslated to your PXE Servers IP (this ofc is in winpe/dos, you have a similar in linux)

/Morten

I'm assuming that the bottleneck is the single network port, rather than the software itself.  More ports=more bandwidth=faster download speed.

I'll take a look at that when I have a chance, thanks.