Deployment Solution

I seem to be having a rather catastrophic issue regarding ADS 6.9 SP5 with batches of 40+ Dell netbooks. We have two servers (one PXE server running Windows Server 2008, and a Ghost server with ADS) with a set of three dumb 24-port Gigabit switches (Netgear JGS524). I have the switches setup in a star topology. As far as I can tell, multicast imaging is set up correctly in the console (239.x.x.x addresses, 50 max clients, network cards are set to 1000Mb full duplex) and the actual images are not corrupt or faulty. Imaging software includes WinPE and RDeploy.

The netbooks themselves are a bit wimpy but I feel like they should be sufficient for this process.

Dell Latitude 2120 netbook
1.5Ghz Atom CPU
2GB Memory

The netbooks initially come with Vista Basic but the images we are pushing are 32-bit Windows 7 Enterprise. Now, on to the actual problem:

It seems that any batch over the size of 10 netbooks will cause a failure rate of about 50%. When I say failure I mean the process will hang at some random point during the imaging. The netbook itself is not hung up, but the software. The Deployment Console still detects that the device is connected, but no progress will be made. Another small portion of the batch will complete imaging but won't load Windows because of a "corrupt OS install" and it will continually boot and kick over to checkdisk. Restarting the process sometimes works but it can take up to 5 tries to get it to succeed. If it were closer to 10% fail rate I would deal with it but this is just over the top.

I am rather suspicious of the netbooks themselves being the problem for one reason. We had a batch of 20 Dell E5420s (i5 CPU, 4GB memory) that imaged simultaneously with zero problems. Not only did they succeed without issue, they were insanely quick compared to the netbooks.

My purpose here is to find out if there is anything I might be missing and if there is anything else I should check. I have quite the deadline to meet and I'd rather resolve this issue than repeat a broken process.

Thanks in advance,

Steve

(Note: I did my best to provide all the information I could think of. Please let me know if there is anything else needed)

I have techs imaging that model of netbook successfully even as we speak. We had problems earlier in the week, but we were going through a Dell switch, and then through the POS Linksys switch inside the Dell netbook carts. Do you have those carts as well, and if so, are you imaging inside them? (See link if you don't know what I mean http://www.weareteachers.com/partners/dell-edu4u/products/item/23700-dell-2110-netbook-cart&wat_type=product)

What's different between your Dell E5420 setup as compared to your netbook setup? Just the netbooks themselves? As I stated, I am imaging that model successfully now with Windows 7 Enterprise 32-bit, so I know it can be done.

That's good news. And no, we are not imaging within the carts. The carts we are using don't have any type of network connectivity. They simply house the netbooks and provide a power strip for the adapters. It's simply server hardware, 3 switches, and a bunch of ethernet cables. There was absolutely no difference in terms of solutions for the netbooks and E5420s.

What you're telling me is that you're able to image around 40-50 of these simulatenously using multicast with no fail rate? I think another part of the problem might be when we try to image numerous batches with different images. Although, we still have issues if we are just using one image on a single batch.

Have you multicasted successfully with these identical switches before? Are your computers actually multicasting? We had time-out issues through the cart's switch - are any of yours timing out as well?

Try this - boot all of your computers into automation as a separate job. Once ALL 40 computers are up and running in automation, then send your imaging job. One of our techs had better success rates doing it that way, as we've found when 40 netbooks all try to grab WinPE at once, they slow down considerably.