Host Virtualizer system:

OS:  Windows Server 2012 R2

RAM:  64GB

Processor:  Intel Xeon CPU E5-2430 0 @ 2.20GHz X24

Network:  Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet 10Gbps dual port (one being used)

Virtual Server with SCCM:

OS:  Windows Server 2008 R2

RAM:  12 GB

Number of processors:  4

SCCM:  SCCM 2012 R2

relevant hotfixes installed:  KB2905002, KB2910552

Issue:

The download/process time for the boot image when imaging a system is way too long.   It is taking on average between 4 and 6 hours to download the two boot image files from the SCCM server (around 250MB of data at most) on a 1 Gbps flat network of around 200 total devices. Once the boot image is downloaded and the system boots into WindowsPE, the rest of the imaging process, including the OS image, is completed in a reasonable amount of time.  I have even reduced the number of network hopes by hooking the test workstation I have been imaging to the same switch the host is plugged into, and no improvement was experienced.

As an experiment, I built another virtual machine on the save Hyper-V host, the same image files are downloaded to the new VM machine in about 2 minutes total, then the rest of the process completes normally.

This is becoming really frustrating as we want to move from our current imaging software to SCCM, but right now the performance is preventing the move to the new imaging solution.

Any suggestions on what I should look at?

Hi,

Have you tweaked the RamDiskTFTPBlockSize value? if not I would try it, if you have I would try switching it back..

http://www.sccm.biz/2013/05/how-to-boost-up-pxe-tftp-boot-speed.html

Regards,
Jrgen

Thank you Jorgen,

It did make a vast improvement.   Instead of 4 to 6 hours to download it completed it in about 10 minutes to 20 minutes (still need to actually time it).  Still seems a bit long, so if you have any other ideas, I would love to hear them, but at least this fix made it workable.

Dan

Is this VMWare or HyperV? Which virtual NIC is being used for ConfigMgr?