Hi all We have about 100 targets booting every morning. Hypervisor is VMware, all targets are deployed via the same template and using PVS Boot ISO. Every morning from 5-10 machines are stuck in boot process, failing to retreive an IP. On the DHCP server all is fine. I did a wireshark and can see, that from the failing machines no DHCP Broadcast is sent. Working machines do a broadcast, get their IP and boot up. Any idea what I can do here?

It may be a network device between your target and PVS blocking the broadcast. What PVS/Target version do you use? Do you stagger the reboot?

What is your DHCP server? If infoblox I have seen this happen where it throttles requests.

Is your VM CIS-hardened? We had a similar problem with WS2022 a month ago where the firewall would randomly remain blocked in public profile.

@François-Xavier Rigaud yes, its CIS-hardened. Do you think this could be an issue in that early stage of boot? @Jeff Riechers normal windows dhcp

@Marco Zimmermann Try the following. It worked very well for us: relax these three CIS policies on your master image. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\PublicProfile AllowLocalPolicyMerge DWORD:*1* HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\PublicProfile AllowLocalIPsecPolicyMerge DWORD:*1* HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\PublicProfile EnableFirewall DWORD:*0* Apply these policies once the boot process is complete.

There are usually are two separate DHCP interactions: one at early boot time and another after the OS is running. Were you referring to the first one? We had sporadic issues with PVS targets not booting, but it turned out to be a busy network link somewhere that was dropping UDP packets. You'd see that in Wireshark, though.