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iPXE Anywhere

iPXE Anywhere is a Network Booting solution utilizing the Open Source iPXE Boot Loader, married with 2Pint’s automation wizardry. It enables ultra-fast booting over any type of network which in turn enables faster Operating System builds and re-builds.
It also uses the latest caching and peer-to-peer tech for minimizing WAN/Internet traffic. It can be hosted locally, or in the Cloud for 24X7 ‘Rebuild from Anywhere’ scenarios.

iPXE Anywhere features​

iPXE Security

The 2Pint Software 2PXE product is subject to an independent 3rd party assessment (usually annually, depending on major code changes)  with security consultants IO Active and these independent reviews are provided to Microsoft upon request.  We follow Microsoft’s security process and UEFI signing requirements (see the following links below for more details. ) We are the only vendor providing signed binaries for the iPXE solution.  You will see 2Pint named in the following links from Microsoft.

UPDATED: UEFI Signing Requirements - Microsoft Community Hub

iPXE Security Assurance Review - Microsoft Community Hub


Rapid recovery

Reset a broken or malware infected PC from anywhere. Recover in hours not days or weeks​. Using iPXE Anywhere your enterprise can be ready to recover from an unexpected malware attack with ease. You can rebuild many thousands of endpoints quickly and without fuss, utilizing Microsoft P2P tech to minimize the bandwidth usage along the way.

P2P magic

Perfect for in-house ‘build factories’​ or any type of mass OS deployment. iPXE Anywhere, in conjunction with the OSD Toolkit uses industrial strength Microsoft P2P tech in order to minimize bandwidth usage and speed up deployment times. Pre-caching content on local systems at remote locations means that you can rebuild with confidence without affecting business critical WAN traffic.

State of the art

iPXE is the leading open source network boot firmware. It provides a full PXE implementation enhanced with additional features such as:

  • boot from a web server via HTTP(S) - supports BranchCache P2P
  • boot from an iSCSI SAN boot from a Fibre Channel SAN via FCoE
  • boot from an AoE SAN boot from a wireless network
  • boot from a wide-area network boot from an Infiniband network
  • control the boot process with a script

iPXE is free, open-source software licensed under the GNU GPL (with some portions under GPL-compatible licenses), and is included in products from several network card manufacturers and OEMs. 2PXE ships with a precompiled version of iPXE that we have developed to include Secure Boot support.

USB based build

You can even build devices with no network, just a USB port will do. You can even use a mobile phone!​​​ Boot securely using either USB (iPXE binary only on the USB media) or PXE boot directly in your remote locations. You can even boot directly from the Cloud, over the Internet, using secure HTTPS Network Booting.

Minimal infrastructure requirement

iPXE Anywhere is a network booting solution that utilizes the iPXE network boot program, which is an Open Source Project. https://ipxe.org/  

iPXE Anywhere enables the booting and management of machines not only within your corporate network but anywhere in the world. If a machine can be connected to a routed network then iPXE Anywhere can boot and build that machine. iPXE Anywhere utilizes the Open Source iPXE Boot Loader to enable ultra-fast booting by loading the main boot files and Windows PE boot image via HTTP. 2Pint Software adds the “Anywhere” which consists of a Proxy DHCP/TFTP/HTTP server called 2PXE

The 2Pint 2PXE Server component can usually be deployed to a single server in order to service many endpoints. 

Customizable

The iPXE Anywhere Web Service is our PowerShell based automation service. The Web Service has a PowerShell provider with which the iPXE Network Boot Program communicates to enable the display of custom menus or perform a myriad of custom actions. The service is hosted as a traditional win32 service which doesn’t require IIS. This server talks HTTP with the client and SQL to the iPXE Anywhere SQL Database. It can be used for ‘extended functionality’ including such things as BIOS updating, interacting with Microsoft MDT, creating custom iPXE menus and virtually anything else that you can think of and script.
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OSD Toolkit

Deploy systems with confidence knowing you are reducing the network impact with Microsoft Peer to Peer and Bandwidth-Managed content downloads. The OSD Toolkit lets you use Microsoft BITS & BranchCache tech in the Windows Pre-Installation Environment (WinPE) environment.​ You can also include the optional StifleR Client which adds more Bandwidth control and gives real-time visibility of the Task Sequence progress. Add 2Pint iPXE Anywhere Network Booting and automation into the mix and you have a world class deployment solution.
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OSD Toolkit features​

Build fast from USB

Problem background

There are some some scenarios where peer-to-peer (P2P) is not really useful or very efficient, and one of them is building a high volume of machines in a sequential fashion. If you build a low number of machines simultaneously, there are simply no peers to get to content from, as they have already been built, shut down, and shipped away. In order to solve this, we marry together the grandness of USB drivers with the awesomeness of BranchCache.

The solution

We mix fast USB keys with BranchCache, give it a stir, and back comes a hybrid method of building machines.

Speed is king

New USB 3.0/1 USB dongles have an amazing speed, up to 400Megabytes per second, which translates to about 3200 Megabit/s per machine. So that means, if you are building 5 machines in parallel, you can get 5 * 3200Mb/s  = 16Gigabit per second. The USB keys are much slower at writing, about 20Megabyte/s which translates to 160Mb/s. But as the write is a single operation, and all operations after that are read, it’s definitely worth it.

Uses Microsoft P2P tech

The OSD Toolkit allows administrators to enable clients to make use of the P2P sharing capabilities of BranchCache during the Windows build process which in turn drastically reduces deployment times and can save you Gigabytes in expensive WAN network traffic. To achieve this state of OSD Karma we give you a simple command line tool which enables the necessary technologies (BITS and BranchCache) in the Windows PE environment. This is incredibly powerful and gives the administrator the tools to speed up deployments while saving precious network bandwidth. Win Win!

Easy integration

It's very easy to integrate the 2Pint OSD Toolkit with your existing Task Sequence based deployment process. Whether you use Microsoft Configuration Manager or Microsoft Deployment Toolkit based sequences, integrating and enabling BranchCache in the process is easy. Just add a few extra steps (following our documentation) and you're done. No need to reinvent the wheel, just reinvest your existing time and effort!

Standard version is FREE

The OSD Toolkit Turbo feature makes BranchCache based transfers go fast. And we mean fast. Speeds of up to 900Mb/s can be achieved (depending on hardware specs) which means that your whole OS Deployment process can be incredibly quick.

To do this we bypass the built-in defaults that limit the P2P transfer speed giving us close to line wire speeds on faster CPU’s and double/tripling/quadrupling the speed on slower CPU’s. 

See the OSD Toolkit Documentation for more details.

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