Hello, I have some questions about how multicast functions in a WDS environment when one switch is IGMP enabled but others are not.
I work for a training center, and we use WDS and MDT to deploy operating system images and virtual machines onto classroom pc's every week. My company's multicast deployments have never worked as reliably as we would want, and I realized that the D-Link
dgs-1024d switches we use in the classrooms are not IGMP compatible. I presume that the multicast traffic from the WDS server is being converted into broadcast traffic and transmitted to every port on the switch, which is not necessarily bad, because we are
deploying to the entire room at once. What I'm unsure about is what happens when we deploy different images to different rooms at the same time. We have our WDS server connected to a Netgear GS724T Switch (which is IGMP v2 compatible), which connects to our
half dozen classroom switches. We do not use VLANs, and we use only one subnet for the deployment network.
My questions are:
1. When I create two multicast transmissions at the same time (each to a different classroom), will the Netgear switch correctly forward the traffic to only the switch that connects to the computers that requested the transmission, or will the D-Link switches'
inability to process IGMP cause the Netgear switch to just send the broadcast transmission to all of it's ports, causing both broadcasts to be sent to every port on the subnet?
2. If my network is guilty of spamming multiple broadcasts, what is a good way to remedy this? We are in the process of replacing our WDS server, would it be a worthwhile solution to put a half dozen nics in the new server, and connect each of the classroom
switches directly to a nic in the WDS server, would that improve performance (we deploy images that are up to 40GB), or would that configuration just run into the same problems?
Thanks!