OSD Toolkit progress indicator

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 and 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 Software iPXE Anywhere network booting and automation into the mix and you have a world-class deployment solution.

OSD Toolkit features​

Uses Microsoft peer-to-peer tech

The OSD Toolkit allows administrators to enable clients to make use of the peer-to-peer 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 tools to speed up deployments while saving precious network bandwidth. Win Win!

Build fast from USB

Problem background

There are some scenarios where peer-to-peer 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 the 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 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.

Easy integration

It's very easy to integrate the 2Pint Software 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 peer-to-peer transfer speed giving us close to line wire speeds on faster CPUs and double/tripling/quadrupling the speed on slower CPUs.

See the OSD Toolkit Documentation for more details.

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