DeployR integrates with the 2Pint Software suite

Since 2Pint Software has been around for over a decade, there are other products that complement DeployR very well.  Here’s a quick rundown:

iPXE Anywhere.  Efficient network booting from anywhere. 

I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of PXE booting, a mechanism that sits on top of DHCP and TFTP protocols to enable the firmware of the device to boot Windows PE from a RAMdisk.  For those familiar with TFTP, you know it can be really challenging from a performance perspective, especially if you want to boot from a remote server.

iPXE Anywhere still uses these same protocols to start the process, but instead of fetching a large Windows PE boot image, it instead fetches a tiny EFI binary, the iPXE open-source boot loader (signed by Microsoft so that it supports Secure Boot).  That iPXE boot loader then uses HTTPS to download Windows PE, which is so much faster.  With DeployR, it can even use BranchCache peering to pull the Windows PE boot image content from nearby clients, which is great for remote clients.

StifleR.  Real-time bandwidth management, throttling and monitoring of all downloads, combined with DeployR and Autopilot progress monitoring.

It seems like everything on Windows these days is downloading “stuff” in the background.  StifleR monitors all those downloads in real time, passing details to the StifleR server which can take action to protect the network from over-saturation and to make peering of that content (whether BITS or DO) as good as possible.  This means it’s not looking at just what is happening on a single client; instead, it is looking at the aggregate activity of all devices on each network on your internal network.

At the same time, those real-time monitoring capabilities are great for tracking DeployR task sequence progress.

It can also track the Windows Autopilot provisioning process, showing download and app installation progress.

There’s much more available too, including remote tools, network discovery, geo-mapping of devices, etc.

StifleR MOM.  On-the-fly caching and peering enablement for all sorts of content.

In an ideal world, all content being downloaded would be peerable, using built-in BranchCache or Delivery Optimization protocols.  But sadly that’s often not the case, especially for non-Microsoft downloads (e.g. self-updating apps).  This is where MOM comes into play.  As a BranchCache-enabled caching proxy, it can automatically download and cache content, while also generating the needed BranchCache hashes needed for peer-to-peer sharing so that subsequent downloads don’t need to go to the internet.

With StifleR able to automatically reconfigure downloads to point to MOM, this is a transparent operation that has no impact on other interactive internet activity (just downloads).

With DeployR, you can explicitly tell it to talk to the MOM server for all internet content downloads (e.g. images downloaded from Windows Update, driver packs downloaded from OEMs), with the same peer-to-peer enablement then available for bare metal OS deployments.

There’s more to come too, so stay tuned.  For more details on these solutions, see the links above as well as the main https://documentation.2pintsoftware.com documentation website.