WDS and multi-architecture boot images

Well, I recently stumbled upon another cute bug/feature with Windows Deployment Services. When you already have 32bit boot images (as we do) and then add an 64bit boot image (which we needed, since the drivers for UCS firmware v2.0 only support Windows Server 2008 R2) you still only see the 32bit images.

Why ? Because apparently the client (in my case a UCS blade) isn’t reporting it’s architecture correctly in the PXE phase. Microsoft actually has a KB article for this. You only need to enable architecture discovery.

That’s it. Once you boot the next client via PXE, you’ll see the 64bit boot image.