Ghost Solution Suite

Just got the new GSS 3.0 setup and ready to go. Little bit of a learning curve, but not to bad so far. HOWEVER, when I create a Distrubute Disk Image task and I want to deploy it to a group of worsktations and do a mulitcast, the option is greyed out, why? What option am I missing that needs to be enabled or re-configured? I am not seeing an easy way to set the automation pre-boot enviroment to a Windows PE that I have setup and configured already, is that something I am missing? Please help!

Thanks

Brad

Are you able to Unicast?

What switch hardware are you using?  For the previous version of Ghost, IGMP snooping needed to be enabled on the switches for multicasting to work.

Yep I am able to Unicast, it does not have anything to do with the networking at all, I cannot even create a imaging job that will all you to check the box and enable it so you do a mulitcast option. Check out the attached picutre in my first post.

Sharing links to these videos in case they are helpful...

• Deploying an image to multiple computers using Peer-to-Peer Multicast
• Deploying an image to multiple computers by Multicasting using the Ghostcast server

I think I stumbled across the problem. It appears that you have to create a WinPE session via the PXE configuration and NOT the Boot Disk Creator, Once I did that, then the option came up. Who would have thought to look there. Glad that is in the documentation....O wait, it's not.

I have no idea what you did to resolve this issue. What exactly was done via the "PXE configuration" to "create a WinPE session"? I used to have access to the "Data transfer mode" checkbox for distributing an image, but it is now greyed out and I have no idea why. I do have a "WinPE Managed" option in the PXE configuration, but I fail to understand why the PXE configuration is linked in any way to being able to multicast. Most of our clients use a WinPE automation partition, not PXE, so why should it matter?

PXE is basically used to permit a machine to boot over a network. The machine bios enables the network card to pull down a boot loader, and that in turn pulls down the operating system that the machine is going to be running in memory - in the case of Ghost, that will be the WinPE boot environment. Since WinPE takes over control of the machine, it will need the correct drivers installed in it, to handle both the network connection and the hard disk. Ultimately, the Ghost server needs to be able to communicate with the target machine(s) in order to perform imaging tasks. Unicast and multicast are then options that can be exploited when the server and clients can communicate reliably and the network environment meets the multicast requirements of GSS.