Wds on BAFM

WDS and multi-architecture boot images

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:31:26 +0000

Well, I recently stumbled upon another cute bug/feature with Windows Deployment Services. When you already have 32bit boot images (as we do) and then add an 64bit boot image (which we needed, since the drivers for UCS firmware v2.0 only support Windows Server 2008 R2) you still only see the 32bit images.

Why ? Because apparently the client (in my case a UCS blade) isn’t reporting it’s architecture correctly in the PXE phase. Microsoft actually has a KB article for this. You only need to enable architecture discovery.

WDS and DL580 G7

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 17:14:56 +0000

We recently received a shipment of Hewlett Packards all-new DL580 G7. While I’m impressed with what they did with the iLO3, I’m quite disappointed with what they did to the PXE-ROM.

Sure, gPXE may be the future and is offering more possibilites than “normal” PXE, however breaking customers deployment option(s) – at least for Windows that is – really wouldn’t be an option.

Now for the long story, we needed to install a temporary Windows on this DL580 (one with testing purposes). That said, we tried for three days to actually make this work (trying different things with the boot image), but it kept ending with the same result.

Install issues with Proliant BL460c G6 and Windows Deployment Services

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:56:53 +0000

We’ve been dealing with authentification issues on newly delivered HP Proliant BL460c G6 blade servers. Most threads on HPs customer forum, suggests changing the NIC driver, embedded within the WDS boot image.

We tried that, but still were getting the following error:

WDS: installation issues

As it turns out, it ain’t really so damn hard .. we tried several times changing various things within the boot image, but it still didn’t change anything. Somehow it was rather easy.