Deploying 64-bit with WDS

So as you probably guessed by my last couple of blogs, I’ve been hacking around with WDS, and there is something weird I’ve noticed. I have a VMware ESXi virtual machine which is running on a 64-bit box with the VM configuration set to Vista 64-bit, however when I boot the VM into network boot […]

So as you probably guessed by my last couple of blogs, I’ve been hacking around with WDS, and there is something weird I’ve noticed.

I have a VMware ESXi virtual machine which is running on a 64-bit box with the VM configuration set to Vista 64-bit, however when I boot the VM into network boot mode, I only see the 32-bit images? How so?

I checked my WDS server and sure enough I have my 32-bit and 64-bit images all their ready to rock, but nothing.

I did a bit of a search and discovered this one. By default it seems that WDS does not allow the client to determine it’s processor architecture and will always dish out a 32-bit image.

Running the following command however will allow the client to determine the architecture and hence offer up the 64-bit images. I haven’t tested this yet but will do soon enough.

wdsutil /set-server /architecturediscovery:yes