Good Afternoon! I was so happy about a week ago when I got Multicasting up and running for my OSD Task Sequences. Over the past few days, I've been doing testing with it and just today started imaging a new batch of new workstations which I received. Also during the past few days, we've been having issues with our voip phone with static and calls being dropped. While imaging 10 at once this morning, I found that the phones were acting up again. After comparing the times, we thought it must be due to the Multicasting. I talked to our head network guy and he basically said that Multicast was transmitting not only to the PCs being imaged, but seemingly to all clients causing major traffic. Unfortunatly, we have no VLANs here so everything's on the same LAN. If my imaging were Acronis - not SCCM - it would be easy to set up an imaging server on it's own small network, but obviously there are many more puzzle pieces with SCCM. Below are some details on my local enviroment. Please let me know if you have any suggestions as to what I may be able to do to remedy this issue and start using multicasting again! - Thanks! Site Enviroment: SCCM 2007 R3 with SQL 2008 R2 (same server) on Windows 2008 R2 x64 - This is run on a VM in ESX 4.1 installed on a n HP Blade Dist Point 1 - Windows 2008 x86 - Standalone DL380 Server Dist Point 2 - Windows 2008 x86 - Standalone DL380 Server All packages for my OSD TS are on both DPs. The DPs run to a stack of 6 Cisco 3870 (?) switches. The HP Blade center contains a total of 6 blades which connect to the same Cisco switch stack as well. Thanks for your suggestions! Ben K.

remove multicast. In my testing it actually slowed down the image process when imaging a small number of computers. John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum/|

I don't know if I would go as far as John. Multicast is not about speeding up deployments, its about having a single stream of data going to multiple endpoints. The point is to decrease network utilization and load. Basically, the server sends a stream on a specific multicast IP Address -- note that there is no destination IP address specified in a multicast stream. Clients wishing to receive the stream tell the network infrastrucutre that they want the stream identified by a multicast IP Address -- this is called subscribing. It's the network infrastrucutre's job to then deliver the stream to the client -- remember there is no destination specified in the stream so all the multicast server can do is send the stream out. If the stream is being delivered to all endpoints or the wrong endpoints, then its the network's fault by definition. If you want to set up a dedicated subnet or VLAN for imaging, no problem, just set up a DP on that subnet and a new boundary dedicated to it. All content during OSD comes from a DP. Make sure the DP has WDS installed and is a Windows 2008 or 2008 R2 server. You can also make it a PXE SP to limit PXE traffic to the subnet also.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | Twitter @JasonSandys

Good Afternoon! I was so happy about a week ago when I got Multicasting up and running for my OSD Task Sequences. Over the past few days, I've been doing testing with it and just today started imaging a new batch of new workstations which I received. Also during the past few days, we've been having issues with our voip phone with static and calls being dropped. While imaging 10 at once this morning, I found that the phones were acting up again. After comparing the times, we thought it must be due to the Multicasting. I talked to our head network guy and he basically said that Multicast was transmitting not only to the PCs being imaged, but seemingly to all clients causing major traffic. Unfortunatly, we have no VLANs here so everything's on the same LAN. If my imaging were Acronis - not SCCM - it would be easy to set up an imaging server on it's own small network, but obviously there are many more puzzle pieces with SCCM. Below are some details on my local enviroment. Please let me know if you have any suggestions as to what I may be able to do to remedy this issue and start using multicasting again! - Thanks! Site Enviroment: SCCM 2007 R3 with SQL 2008 R2 (same server) on Windows 2008 R2 x64 - This is run on a VM in ESX 4.1 installed on a n HP Blade Dist Point 1 - Windows 2008 x86 - Standalone DL380 Server Dist Point 2 - Windows 2008 x86 - Standalone DL380 Server All packages for my OSD TS are on both DPs. The DPs run to a stack of 6 Cisco 3870 (?) switches. The HP Blade center contains a total of 6 blades which connect to the same Cisco switch stack as well. Thanks for your suggestions! Ben K. I'd go back to networks and ask them figure out why all machines are receiving the multicast broadcast, and not just those that have subscribed to it. Here's some links about multicasting in the documentation library ... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc161836.aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc431418.aspx

Ask your network administrator whether IGMP snooping is enabled and working on your access switches. IGMP snooping should listen to the IGMP Join and Leave messages and only send the multicast streams to those hosts (i.e., the ones that are imaging) rather than send it to every interface on the switch.