VirtualPimp

So, you’ve rolled out your Windows Deployment Services in your production network. But when you are deploying images to computers or servers the network bandwidth to all other clients on the network becomes very low or even the clients are losing the network connection.

In my environment I was using a HP ProCurve switch with Multicast Filtering (IGMP) enabled. But I noticed that the Multicast Filtering wasn’t working. The default WDS multicast range is from 239.0.0.1 to 239.0.0.254. But if you look at the manual of the HP ProCurve switch, you’ll see they excluded this range from filtering.

So with this in mind, you go to the WDS Server properties and change the multicast range from 239.0.1.1 to 239.0.1.254, so it wouldn’t be excluded anymore on the switch IGMP filtering. So after testing this, the WDS server stopped DDoS my clients (: For the ones who don’t want to search for this setting on their environment, I’ve made a movie, also available in HD, where you can find this setting (sorry, no mic, so it’s a very quiet movie).

Also, if you like,  you can throttle the bandwidth used by WDS with a registry key. In the registry, browse to HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesWDSServerProvidersWDSMCProfilesCustom and set the TpMaxBandwidth setting to something less than 100. It’s the percentage of available bandwidth that the server uses.

Tested with:
Server OS: Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Switch: HP ProCurve 2810-48G (J9022A)