OSD PXE strange issue

[matt1234]

Hi,

 

Our main site has multiple locations, and a few of them within the US support and deploy our images from the main office via SCCM 2012 R2 SP1 CU3. We have been troubleshooting some network issues recently, that I believe we have cleaned up now. However during some deployment testing, we are experiencing some inconsistent results that I hope someone may have an answer or idea of where to look.

 

-Created 4 VMs setup for OSD (testing/troubleshooting) all of the VMs are set for PXE.

-All machines boot up and get to the PXE menu and populate the available task sequences with no issues.

-Our guy has reported that he started the same task sequence to all the VMs at same time manually, where they all will download the boot image as so, and move forward onto the imaging process.

-Anywhere from 2 out of the 4, to 3/4 of the VMs startup just fine and run the task sequence to completion. The other 1-2 (depending on the test run, it varies) will reboot and then launch within winPE and start the task sequence.

 

I could be wrong here, but I believe usually when a TS reboots it is because the boot image from the PXE or boot media differs from the boot image assigned to the TS which makes sense. Though, given nothing is different from one VM to the other, the TS is the same...which has me scratching my head.

 

My other theory(keyword theory) is our user is experiencing this upon the boot up itself while downloading the boot image from the bios menu. VM 2 is requesting this boot image that maybe "busy" at that very second due to VM 1 requesting it as well, forcing sccm to use another available boot image? - more than likely wrong here, nor does that really make sense to me, I'm just picking straws at this point.

 

Has anyone run into this, or seen it before? Any thoughts, things to try?

 

 

Thank you

 

[thadkew]

Hi Matt1234

Without logs, it's hard to determine exactly what the issue might be. I know it's hard to gather the logs (especially since it's intermittent), but we really need to see the smsts.log file.

Are there any indications prior to this reboot where you have the time to open a command prompt (the reboot will not occur if the command prompt is up) and then get the log?

[matt1234]

Hi Matt1234

Without logs, it's hard to determine exactly what the issue might be. I know it's hard to gather the logs (especially since it's intermittent), but we really need to see the smsts.log file.

Are there any indications prior to this reboot where you have the time to open a command prompt (the reboot will not occur if the command prompt is up) and then get the log?

 

Hi Thadkew,

 

I will reach out and see if I can get ahold of it - and it happens to want to reboot.

 

I'll have to talk to our IT admin onsite at that location and see if I he has any other information other than what I have been provided. From what I understand, there isn't any indication that the TS is going to reboot or not. One thing, that I will be sure to highlight is, when our admin there presses F12 to note what boot image ID and if there is any difference there.