Is Imaging over wireless possible and/or feasible? PXE boot over Wireless?

Question

I am looking to implement (if possible/feasible) the ability to image a PC and Mac via our wireless network. Is this actually possible? I have read multiple documents that newer Macbook Airs can do this, but would that require having Multicasting on within our entire network? We have only have it on in 1 VLAN to minimize chatter on our network. Right now we have a PXE boot to gain access to a ghostcasting session that we instantiate. Is it possible to setup a wireless (netboot?) to PXEboot to ghostcasting?

I figure sending that much data over our wireless network ( which serves 13k+ users) would use a good portion of available bandwidth per VLAN. ( about 50GB in our image )

Any Ideas / alternatives?

Answer 1

There aren't standards in PXE for Wifi that make this feasible. Apple does "wireless netboot" functionality in some of their models, but this isn't going to help you with PXE booting PCs because it's purely proprietary.

Even if you could do this, I question the performance, reliability, and efficiency of using this method. You'd be soaking up a massive amount of your wireless bandwidth to stream a multicast image. I don't see how this would offer any significant advantages over wired connections. It would take forever to image a machine this way, it would probably be unreliable (Ghost is not known for handling a lossy network during imaging very well), and it would ruin the performance of the wireless network for everybody else at the same time.