Microsoft have released on 8th November 2013 a hotfix for SCCM 2012 R2, KB2905002. Unless you’re not using SCCM for imaging, this hotfix is a must. This fix fixes two seperate issues. The first which I’ll copy verbatim from Microsoft’s site is:

After you enable the PXE Service Point role on an instance of a specific distribution point, or you select the Deploy this boot image from the PXE-enabled distribution point property of a boot image, the Windows Deployment Service (WDS) stops running.

Pretty major bug. The second fix everyone would have noticed is around the slowless of deploying an image (a.k.a. OSD) from R2. It’s rather slow! Again, verbatim:

When operating system image files are downloaded to Configuration Manager 2012 R2 clients, you may find that the download takes longer than it did in previous versions of Configuration Manager 2012 clients. You may see this behavior when the target client is running Windows PE or a full Windows operating system.

You can download the fix from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2905002 and the fix needs to be installed on pretty much any SCCM server you have. It will nicely create packages if you have lots of servers to push it out to, or you can just do it manually per server. It will stop and start services, and ask you to restart after installing in most scenarios so keep this in mind.

Distribution Points don’t need the update, even if they’re running as a PXE Service Point. You can’t run it on one (I tried!).

You’ll also need to run the hotfix against any PC running the console as there’s an update for that too.

Thanks yet again to @nickstugr for alerting me to the update.

Update 12/11/2013 – Confirmed that the patch has put deployment speeds back to how they once were.