Speeding up the 1E PXE Lite boot process

This week I had the great fortune of hanging out with fellow MVP Dave Kawula and OSD guru Emile Cabot during the #OSDWeek in Calgary. Yesterday we installed and configured the 1E PXE Lite software that allows normal Windows clients act as PXE servers for ConfigMgr 2012. Though it worked perfectly well, I thought the boot image download process was much slower than it used to be (almost 80 seconds in a virtual machine), and after some research I noted that the PXE Lite setup didn’t set the TFTP Ramdisk blocksize in the default .bcd file, but instead was using the default of 1456 bytes. Well, cranking it up to 16384 makes it much faster…

Modifying the .bcd entry to speed up the network boot.

After doing the following changes, my 80 seconds download, went down to about 20 seconds.

Note: This may very well be unsupported by 1E so please don’t call their support about issues with this :)

1. Figure out where your PXE Lite enabled boot image is, in my environment it was in the C:\ProgramData\1E\PXELite\TftpRoot\Images\PS100019 folder
   
   
   
2. Make a backup copy of the .bcd file (boot.PS100019.bcd in my example).
3. Open an elevated command prompt, and type the following command:
   
   bcdedit /store C:\ProgramData\1E\PXELite\TftpRoot\Images\PS100019\boot.PS100019.bcd /set {ramdiskoptions} ramdisktftpblocksize 16384
   
4. Done, now the boot image downloads much quicker… If you want to verify the configuration, you can run the following command:
   
   bcdedit /enum all /store C:\ProgramData\1E\PXELite\TftpRoot\Images\PS100019\boot.PS100019.bcd

The bcdedit commands executed.

The PXELiteServer.log showing the new block size.

The highspeed PXE download.