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Bootimage download with HTTP instead of TFTP

Downloading the boot image with TFTP is slow and download may fail within slow or unreliable networks.
Downloading with HTTP or iSCSI will increase the speed dramatically and the stability is improved also.
With iPXE this technology is implemented and works fine.
My idea is to implement the HTTP download with SCCM.
This would be a great enhancement to performance and stability in the OS deployment.

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Anonymous shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
Noted  ·  sangeev responded  · 

Hi. I’m setting the status back to Noted – this was mixed up with the item “Add support for TFTP Window Size” – that has been Started and is available in the 1603 tech preview build.

Thanks,
BobMN on behalf of SangeeV for SCCM OS Deployment

Show previous admin responses (2)

17 comments

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  • Matias Hohl commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Dear MS. We've a factory where we deploy about 5'000 devices per month. A lot of time gets lost waiting 5'000 times for this slow TFTP download at the PXE boot. This nice idea had it's 5th birthday some time ago and is still only "Noted". For compatibility with all hardware models and virtual platforms we're forced to use a ramdisktftpblocksize of 1356 and a ramdisktftpwindowsize of 4 which leads to long wait times.

  • Nivlac commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    +1 here. Currently I am using 4 different ramdisktftpblocksize and ramdisktftpwindowsize in order to work with different types of environment

    1) ramdisktftpblocksize 1432 for VPN tunnel network
    2) ramdisktftpwindowsize 4 for VMware legacy PXE rom compaibility
    3) ramdisktftpblocksize 8192 + ramdisktftpwindowsize 4 for HP laptop using USB-c dock
    4) ramdisktftpblocksize 16384 + ramdisktftpwindowsize 8 for regular desktop for best speed

    This is way too inefficient and complicated.

  • Johnny Soto commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    The last admin note on this was more than three years ago. While SCCM has had many great features added in that time, I don't know why this has not been implemented yet. It's such a great idea and a way of saving so much time. PXE would still be used to download the .sdi file but if the next part was HTTP, it would improve performance a tremendous amount.

    From someone who has lost WEEKS of their life waiting for TFTP downloads.

  • Philip Webb commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I realise this is an old request but I'd like to add another voice to this. It would be an incredibly useful feature to have natively in SCCM.
    While the other comments are right that iPXE does this, it shouldn't really be neccessary to use third party software, and it requires extra steps when you update your boot image that could be eliminated natively.
    Any chance this might actually get done?

  • James Dennis commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Add support for PXE over HTTP, we have experimented with iPXE and the performance is incredible, boot wim download from 5 minutes to a few seconds.

  • Gibson99 commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Any updates on this? With newer machines that don't have an ethernet jack (MS Surface series, Latitude 7370, plenty of others), PXE boot is painfully slow - ranging from 30 minutes to several HOURS (if it doesn't just fail outright). Would be great to have a cure for that, not to mention speeding up the 3-5 minute PXE boot times of other machines.

  • Nash Pherson (MVP) commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    PXE reliability and performance has been a considerable hurdle for almost every organization that has tried it. On most ConfigMgr engagement I've worked on, regardless of network hardware vendor or age, PXE unfortunately has been something that requires several meetings to get it to kinda sorta mostly work in most places. Anything we can do to get off the TFTP protocol from 1981 will go a long way to making this actually work well in enterprises without so much pain and suffering.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    If loading the boot image/windows PE with http instead of TFTP, then it could also be WAN accelerated. Thinking ahead, it could might even work together with the cloud so you could boot an installation from a DP in Azure.

    Think about it. Bare metal installations from the cloud.

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