Hi All,
We currently have 2x DPs configured for multicasting with the OS images & their associated advertisements configured accordingly.
We're observed some odd issues where machines are PXE booting and the countdown (we have set at 5 minutes or 10 clients) counts down to 271 seconds and hangs there... then say it's opening a multicast session... then the timer resets back to the beginning and it starts again? There's definitely 10+ PCs doing this at the same time so it's not a case of there not being enough to start the session in <5 minutes. This happens a few times then it starts to 'download' but none of the machines are seemingly in sync, they just seem to give up and start 'multicasting'. Looking at wdsutil it's clear machines who fall into this weird state aren't actually using multicasting.
What's interesting, is where we were seeing this issue on one occasion, we removed the OS image from DP1, so it was only on DP2, and multicasting worked as expected.
With another image we found the odd issue, we decided to replicate this 'solution', taking the OS image from DP2 and leaving it only on DP1 and unfortunately the weird 271 seconds stall issue occurred.
I'm trying to think of where to start. One thing was to understand a bit more about, in a scenario where an OS image is on both DPs - what is the logic in place to decide which DP a machine will decide to pull the image from?
Thanks for any thoughts.
Update: I've now read this http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632366.aspx which indicates, given our current configuration, that the two DPs would be treated entirely equal as they are configured identically, and although exist on separate subnets, neither of this subnets is shared by our clients.