OSD Capture agonizingly slow.

[RebelRenegade]

I am doing some proof of concept in our test lab for OSD in ConfigMgr 2007. Everything else works fine. There are no speed issues on the network. Other file transfers during WinPE have no issues. However, the capture sequence takes 3+ hours for a 3GB image.

 

 

I've tried to capture using network shares on two different servers with the same results. Despite what the log suggests, I suspect there's a feature or configuration issue on the DP that the sequence is looking for but not finding. If you watch the network activity, it's long periods of nothing followed by a short burst of slow transfer. Eventually the .wim is created and I can deploy the image with no problems.

 

The build and capture runs on an ESXi 5 VM. I'm going to try a build and capture on a physical server to eliminate some odd driver issue, but that seems unlikely since those same drivers don't have a problem transferring files in a non capture TS.

[RebelRenegade]

Problem goes away when the TS is run on a physical server. Tried changing the VM drivers to VMXNET and VMXNET3 with no change.

 

Gonna run another ESX host from the physical server I ran the TS on to see if that changes anything. Also gonna try a Hyper-V host on that same box.

[randy]

When you do a capture on the VM, do you remove the VMWare tools first (or not have them installed in the first place)?

[RebelRenegade]

When you do a capture on the VM, do you remove the VMWare tools first (or not have them installed in the first place)?

It's been a while, so I don't remember 100%. I don't think I had the tools installed for the build and capture. I had this same problem using a Hyper-V guest. No issues on a physical server. I just use a physical for the build and capture now.

[Jeremy]

I know this isn't an answer but I thought I would throw this out there -

 

 

I am having the same issue but only with VirtualBox VM's. Actually it's super slow capturing or even applying an image. According to the activity lights it seems to be an issue with hard drive IO rather than a network issue. I don't use either Hyper-V or Esx and I'm doing this for Windows 7 and not Server though.

 

I am however able to use vmware fusion (on a mac); vmware player (PC); and Parallels (Mac) and get a decent image capture/deployment time.