Our current setup is a server running all the roles necessary to run WDS and another server just running file services. These two servers are on a single 24 port switch and we usually image about 12 to 16 clients every 45 min or so depending on how big the image is. We have about six racks of switches set up this way, we do a lot of imaging. Each rack might have a different image going, we create custom images for customers. I have set up two to three teamed nics on each server with static link aggregation going to the hp switches on all racks. The transfer speed is nice, but I want it faster.
So I was wondering if I put in another file server on each switch and replicated between both file servers so they have exactly the same images on a single share, if there was a way to get the 12 to 16 clients on each switch to load balance between file severs when WDS points the clients to the share for the image?
I looked into multicast, but the way we are imaging wont work with it. Our boot.wim loads a Pre-installtion Enviroment with Ghost and other utilities and point to the file share for the image to transfer and we have a start cmd script that runs ghost to image them. So all we do is PXE boot the clients and thats it. Once those clients are done, we start on anther group of clients.
I also looked into DFS and I read it could do load balancing, but I can't find out how it load balances. The more I read into it the more I find out it can't help in this situation.