Slow imaging speeds because of SMB throttling on network

Products

• Deployment Solution

Issue/Introduction

Slow imaging speeds because of SMB throttling on network.

In one case, imaging with Ghost Task Server allowed imaging to take place in 6 minutes where imaging with Deployment Server (using Ghost imaging) required over a hour. This was after verifying that the NIC driver in WinPE Automation was not causing the issue.

Cause

SMB throttling was enabled on network.

To verify that SMB throttling is the cause of the issue, the following test will verify this issue:

1. Create a Copy File To job that copies all files of a complete image to a directory on a Windows XP workstation. When this job is run, the copy process should take several minutes to complete because SMB is NOT being used in the copy process.

2. From the same Windows XP workstation, establish a network connection to the image file source and "drag copy" all files of the same image to a directory on the hard drive. This process will probably take +30 minutes since this IS using SMB which is being throttled on the network.

Resolution

The resolution to this issue is to remove or alter current SMB throttling settings on layer 3 switches and/or routers.

Applies To
Deployment Server all versions.

(Several reported cases were with virtualized Deployment Server 6.9 SP1 installations.)