Deploy Vista Remotely

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Friday, August 10, 2007

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Adding OS images on WDS
On the WDS console, you will see the WDS server, ready to accept new OS images. Before this put your Vista distribution DVD in the WDS server's DVD drive. To add a new Vista image, expand the WDS server icon and right click on Install images. From the context menu, select Add Install Image. This will kick off a wizard to extract Windows Image Format (WIM) from the DVD.

WIM is a file-based imaging format that can store a large number of individual system images. The wizard will ask you to create a new image group. For this select 'Create New Image Group'. Next you will be asked for the image source files. For this browse the file at 'Vista DVD\SOURCES\INSTALL.WIM' and click next. Then the screen shows all the WIM files from the Vista DVD and gives you the list of all available WIM images. Here select the images that you want in your deployment server and click next. It will start processing the selected WIM files and then copies them to your WDS server.

To configure remote boot process you need to go to 'boot' tab and under 'default boot image' option select the newly created boot image

Once all the images have been copied, you need to add a boot image to the WDS deployment server, so that the clients can be connected and booted from the WDS service. To do so open the WDS management console and expand the WDS server from left navigation pane. Then right click on boot images and select 'Add boot image' and choose the image from Vista DVD\SOURCES\ BOOT.WIM. Next you need to associate this file with WDS, so that a remote client can use this file while booting. For this right click on the WDS server from the console and select properties from the context menu. In the properties sheet select the 'Boot' tab and go to 'Default boot image (optional)' option. Select x86 architecture and add newly created boot image and then click OK. With this Vista image is ready to be served on the network for remote deployment. Finally, you need to restart WDS services.To do so right click WDS server from the management console, select all tasks and restart.

After you've configured WDS server, boot-up a client machine from it. You'll get the screen on the left. After that the installation files are copied (right) to the client and the OS installation begins

Client requirements
At the client's end, a machine that supports PXE LAN booting is needed. Configure the machine from the BIOS so that it can be booted from the network card directly. Once your machine gets the IP address from the DHCP running on WDS server, you will see the installation process getting started and after sometime you will see Windows Vista installation wizard on the remote client machine.

 Now you have deployed Vista completely without even using an installer DVD.

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