Imaging is affecting network speeds

[TCC]

While imaging less than 10 computers at a time (sometimes less than 5 computers), we are getting reports from our network infrastructure team that network bandwidth is maxed out and saturated to the point that all users on campus cannot utilize any network assets. We have a 1GB backbone/switches throughout campus and all imaging communication resides on premise inside our DMZ. We usually image via unicast to our WDS server and expect to be able to image up to ~25 without speed issues before going with multicast transmissions, but are still having network speed issues with less than 10 at one time. We have been able to image successfully in the past without speed issues, but we are trying to pinpoint what has changed since then causing our bottle-neck. Our image size has actually decreased in size to 10.4GB. Any input is appreciated.

[SmartDeploySupport]

With unicast, it's essentially the same as 10 different user's trying to unzip a 10GB compressed file across the network.  If that effects your network too much, then might just want to do multicast, or stagger the times at which the unicast deployments are happening.

Below ~25 clients, mulitcast is supposed to be slower overall because Microsoft's WDS mulitcast first copies the image to the local disk, and it's then applied from there.  But, it will only impact the network as a single file copy.

Thanks,

SmartDeploy Support