This is just a heads up really to those who like me got a shed load of mobile devices that have only the dedicated UEFI BIOS with no legacy support and need to be imaged.
I had to spend a few days trying to figure out why I could not boot the UEFI devices to a PXE environment as I could our PCs.
The PCs would happily boot, get a DHCP address, talk to the WDS server and download the PXE environment; selct the task and off it would go.
No such luck with these mobile devices and there was minimal verbose messages to provide any clues. I wasn't even sure fi they were actually getting a DHCP lease.
I did many searches on the forums to discover that many people were having the same experience - for some activating options 60 and 67 on their DHCP scope helped, for others putting in helper addresses on the vlans did the trick. I already use helper address's and as I was working within the same vlan as the WDS server it was un-necessary. Then I discovered that some versions of the EFI BIOS have difficulty dealing with networks configured for jumbo packets - I have dual 10Gb links, or course jumbo is enabled - but it wasn't that either. So to remove any potential network config issues I plugged the devices into the spare ports on the server racks. As a result I started to see a few PXE error messages..
Looking at the DHCP logs on the servers, it was fairly clear that the clients were in fact now getting a DHCP address but timing out waiting for a response from the WDS server. So clients were getting an IP address but couldn't discover, even after messing with option 60, the WDS server.
Then I came across a post where someone had said that you can only image using WDS to UEFI is if the WDS box is standalone - I have absolutely no idea why that would be the case, to be honest it sounded like a load of pants, but having pretty much exhausted all other avenues I thought why not.
So fortunately I have a server template on our VMware network which I quickly deployed and installed just the WDS service and fixed the IP.
So at this point I had the old intergrated WDS ( with Deployment Work Bench) up and running and the new WDS up and running. From the old I exported the boot disk ; copied it over to the new server and then imported it.
At this point I thought I would just boot up one of the mobile devices to see if it could talk to the new WDS server.
Guess what it could!! Of course I was a happy boy, not pants after all, but it didn't stop there........
I left the client running while I set about trying to figure out how to move images from the old WDS to the new; from the corner of my eye the client I left running had discovered the series of tasks waiting for me to click next. It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't configured any tasks on the new server, that in actual fact it was picking up the tasks off the old server.
So I thought sod it, we'll give it a go - it works and I have no idea why!
Does anyone have an explanation as to why a standalone WDS should work over an integrated WDS, or even how after booting to the new WDS it still picked up the jobs from the old WDS and worked?