Our images keep growing by a few gigabytes each year and at 39GB, I decided to do a re-evaluation of all the different imaging options. Here is a chart using only 3 clients for both multicast and unicast for Ghost, Rdeploy, and WIM imaging. All connections are Gigabit and all clients were started concurrently, even in unicast scenarios. I'll update the WIM multicast values Monday as they won't finish this work day.
| Multicast from server | 6305 | 600g1 | 800g2 |
| Ghostcast with clients from Mike's Laptop | 1:22 | 1:26 | 1:24 |
| WIM Multicast from CCPXE | 5:00+ | 5:00+ | 5:00+ |
| Peer Multicast | 6305 | 600g1 | 800g2 |
| Ghost peer multicast | :53 | 1:21 | :54 |
| Rdeploy peer multicast | 2:04 | 2:08 | 2:05 |
| Unicast | 6305 | 600g1 | 800g2 |
| Rdeploy Unicast | 1:05 | 1:18 | :50 |
| WIM Unicast | :28 | :29 | :29 |
| Ghost Unicast | :53 | 1:22 | :56 |
Focusing on WIM, you can see it is by far the fastest imaging option for individual clients, but also the worst for multicast performance. Even if you discount the slow multicast speeds, it then has to "apply" the image after it's been transferred, wasting even more time. Server 2012 R2 doesn't have "profile" registry tweaks you can perform, it's just supposed to auto detect.
Computers use the following commands from Windows PE5x32 to connect to the WDS server. Diskpart was used to create partitions and C:\image folder. Note that I have to use ImageX as DISM doesn't support referencing an RWM file.
i:\automation\WIMImageScripts\wdsmcast.exe /progress /verbose /transfer-file /server:WDS1 /Namespace:WDS:Win7x64/DM_Combined_Images_04-29-2016-(3).wim/1 /sourcefile:DM_Combined_Images_04-29-2016-(3).wim /destinationfile:c:\image\DMAdobe.WIM /username:d204\d204i /password:xxxxxxxxxxx i:\automation\WIMImageScripts\wdsmcast.exe /progress /verbose /transfer-file /server:WDS1 /Namespace:WDS:Win7x64/DM_Combined_Images_04-29-2016-(3).wim/1 /sourcefile:Res.RWM /destinationfile:c:\image\Res.RWM /username:d204\d204i /password:xxxxxxxxxxxxx I:\automation\imagex32.exe /apply "c:\image\DMAdobe.wim" 1 c: /ref c:\image\Res.RWM
WDS1 is Server 2012 R2 running on Hyper-v 2012 R2 with the standard network adapter (not legacy). It's running on a generation 2. We have all Cisco 2960-s gigabit switches with IGMP snooping on. We've verified that ports not used in the broadcast don't get the traffic (at least with Ghost).
Where should I go next to fix this or should I just use Ghost peer multicast as my only "decent" multicast option?