Capacity Requirements

Windows Deployment Services servers can generate a lot of network traffic when servicing multiple, simultaneous client requests. Plan for this network load by designing your deployment network for sufficient capacity. You can deploy multiple Windows Deployment Services servers or use multicasting (requires Windows Server 2008 or later versions) in environments that experience significant installation activity. Note that beyond about 25 to 50 simultaneous clients, the bottleneck becomes TFTP, which is unicast and is required to download Windows PE. (Windows Deployment Services supports multicast download of Windows PE only for x64 Unified Extensible Firmware Interface [UEFI] machines). You can allocate access to Windows Deployment Services by using DHCP scopes and IP subnetting. You can also configure IP Helper tables to direct clients to one or another Windows Deployment Services server based on client network ID.