Hello all, I have some question on OSD that I'm hoping will be answered: 1. If I want to advertise a OSD TS to known and unknown computers, I should be able to do this as long as I set the ADV to be not mandatory, set the TS to run only on specified platforms (we don't have any x64 Windows Vista) and also set a password to PXE boot. Any pitfalls in doing this? 2. We currently use MDT, I have integrated MDT into SCCM, PSP has been installed on a new server. I would like to use MDT once in a while to image, this should be possible as long as I change the WDS provider order, correct? I know that most articles say don't configure WDS after PSP has been installed, but also have seen once that say it's OK to configure WDS after PSP install. 3. We tested multicast using SCCM OSD, got horrible speeds when testing unless it was on the same switch. Changed the apBlockSize in WDS and that seemed to help, although the CPU is maxed out when imaging with this change. The SCCM server is a vmware VM and the network speed shown is 10Gbps, and as far as I know the networking gear is all cisco. Any ideas on how to improve the speed without the registry change? I tried setting the "transfer rate" to 1gbps, but that didn't help unless I made the registry change. 4. When running "use toolkit package" I see that it gets downloaded multiple times, shouldn't it cache the content? I tried "persist content in the client cache", but that didn't seem to help. 5. Which packages used by the TS need to have the "multicast" attribute set? I'm assuming the actuall image and anything that runs in PE, so MDT toolkit should have the "allow this package to be transferred via multicast", correct?

no one? Were my questions stupid or too challenging ?:)

1. no pitfalls as long as you follow that, in addition you may want to password protect your ts for peace of mind. How can I password Protect a Task Sequence ? Password Protecting a Task Sequence 2. possible, kinda.... once you integrate MDT with SCCM and enable the PSP then PSP takes 'over' control of WDS... which means MDT doesn;t. If you want both at the same time consider another PXE boot server for MDT separately on a different subnet or enable Johans F11 trick for PXE boot - http://www.deployvista.com/Blog/JohanArwidmark/tabid/78/EntryID/99/language/sv-SE/Default.aspx 3. have you configured the switches to handle the multicast traffic ? 4. how many times do you use the same step, you can look at your task sequence, as long as there's no reboot between steps you don't need to keep redownloading it 5. if something takes place in WinPE then sure, use the feature if you want My step by step SCCM Guides I'm on Twitter > ncbrady

Thanks Niall, appreciate the response. Yes, we have multicasting enabled. Whether it is done correctly or not, I don't know. Our network group handles this. But I know it wasn't working at all before they enabled it. Like I said multicast works, but just slow unless I changed the registry value. I'm using the MDT integrated TS and haven't added any additional steps. Another question along these lines: Should the OSD TS be set to "download content" or "access content directly" ? I think I read something where you stated that it was faster when set to "access content directly". When I did this, it looked like the .wim wasn't being downloaded using multicast. So I'm assuming that If I want to use multicast, it should be set to "download content". So when I have "download content" set on the OSD TS advertisement, and I have "allow this package to be transferred via multicast" on the "MDT toolkit package", I think I saw the MDT package being downloaded 5 times. I think the MDT integrated TS has this step listed 5 times. Persist content in client cache didn't seem to do anything. Thanks