Deployment and Imaging Group

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  • 1.  8.1 RU7 is out - with iPXE for Deployment

    Trusted Advisor
    Posted Jul 17, 2018 10:31 AM

    Release notes for RU7

    iPXE Release Notes (an optional, hopefully faster, replacement of the PXE boot image boot loader)

    I'd love for the RU7 release notes to be stickied here, seems confusing to link to 8.0 and 8.1 as both are outdated now.  Hoping to test and deploy RU7 and iPXE here in the next week or two.



  • 2.  RE: 8.1 RU7 is out - with iPXE for Deployment

    Posted Jul 18, 2018 05:12 AM

    Put this on a dev box and asked a colleague to try it but initial observation was that iPXE was possibly worse than old PXE/TFTP. Need to look into it more but interested in others' experiences.

    Martin



  • 3.  RE: 8.1 RU7 is out - with iPXE for Deployment

    Trusted Advisor
    Posted Jul 18, 2018 12:41 PM

    @MrSoapsud - In production on old PXE/TFTP my test to get to boot menu was 2 mins 20 seconds.  On iPXE my first test was 1 minute 20 seconds.

    This was a win7 legacy boot machine.  I am hopeful it helps with the much slower UEFI boots I was seeing, but I won't be able to test that until tomorrow.

     



  • 4.  RE: 8.1 RU7 is out - with iPXE for Deployment

    Trusted Advisor
    Posted Aug 17, 2018 08:13 AM

    @MrSoapSud - Just wanted to come back to say it depends on model computer for me.  My Latitude 5480s sit at like 10-20 seconds on the loading .wim file, but on the 5470s it's a few minutes at that boot.wim stage.  Going to troubleshoot and see if I can get to the bottom of it.  Support said "I did find  discussions around I-217, I-218, I-219 NIC devices.The discussion noted that these devices may need to have the firmware upgraded. So check the equipment manufactures and see if there is a firmware upgrade, it maybe a bios upgrade to upgrade the NIC controller"

     

    Edit: both 5480 and 5470 appear to use I-219 NICs.  Updating BIOS on 5470 didn't help speed it up.  :(



  • 5.  RE: 8.1 RU7 is out - with iPXE for Deployment

    Trusted Advisor
    Posted Aug 23, 2018 06:57 AM

    I haven't had any luck troubleshooting why 5470 slow to boot. I updated BIOS and preboot drivers.  Support closed the ticket as they seemed to be out of ideas.  Frustrating.