Hello,
Recently I installed a Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 server, with DHCP, AD, WDS and Routing and Remote Services Roles.
This server is supposed to be a Ghost Server, which works pretty good.. except for Multicast traffic.
I've read dozens of articles stating that IGMP snooping has to be activated on switches e.t.c., but this is the case.
IGMP Snooping is activated on all switches that my VLAN comes into contact with, so that may not be the problem.
However, the issue that I am receiving is that clients can connect to the ghostcast server, that the session becomes 'In Progress' but nothing happens. The clients do not receive the actual traffic.. they are just 'waiting for session to start'.
If I stop the ghostcast server, some clients receive a time-out or other error, other clients are just standing there, 'waiting for session to start'.
Some times, Ghostsrv.exe just chrashes as soon as I click Stop..
Unicast works without a problem, but Multicast and Directed Broadcast do not.
When I manually start the devices to ghost32.exe and click Ghostserver-->Multicast --> Sessionname --> Ok, Ok, Yes.. then the devices actually start running, but it is unicast (because they start directly, without waiting for the others). However, it says in the status screen that it is Multicast.
Somehow, I guess, the Multicast traffic does not reach the clients.. I can see the clients talk to the server, but as soon as Start or Send is pressed, (or Autosend starts), the whole process dies.. without either the server nor the clients knowing it..
i receive 0 error messages during this whole process..
Some background information:
We are imageing clients with images delivered to us from customers. So we cannot change anything on the actual images. Sothat's why we use WDS for PXE-Boot (it's 500% faster then TFPT), and we only have 1 server for all 5 purposes, because the max load will be 100 clients per run..