Multicast imaging recommendations?

[tanderson]

We have 700 MacBook Pros that need to be imaged. Because of space and staff limitations here, we have a vendor partner that images them for us at their facility. They are connected to us by dedicated VPN and we have a local NetBoot server and distribution point at their location.

This is the first year we're using Casper Imaging with them (last year they used DeployStudio). They imaged 150 systems using PreStaged imaging for us over the summer but the performance was a bit slow so we're hoping to use Casper Multicast Server to speed things up.

Anyone have experience using this? Is it reliable? Anything to watch out for?

Looking at the setup screen for the MCS, it looks like a compiled image will need to be used? What about dual boot configurations?

As you can see, lots of questions so any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom

[cbrewer]

Multicast works great once you spend a little time getting speeds tweaked for your environment. I haven't used the Casper multicast app since I've always just served it using ASR from the command line. Far as I know, you can't multicast a winclone image. If you wanted to multicast Windows, you'd need to switch to Windows Deployment Services or another tool.