All things related to multicast

["Ying Zhang" <>]

Hello all,

 

In our university, we using Novell ZENworks preboot services to image thousands of lab computers. We found if use unicast to do imaging, it takes about 30 minutes for each client, while using multicast takes hours to image a lab with 20+ machines. And the time increases proportionally with the number of machines. What is strange about this is it takes a lot longer to do multicast, no matter how many clients are being imaged.

 

The server and clients are on the same VLAN. So no multicast routing is involved. IGMP is enabled on the switch. It uses group address 231.164.242.170. Just wondering if any other universities have similar experience and what could be done on the network side to improve the performance. Any help is appreciated.

 

Ying

UNB