Posted in Several months ago I retired an old helpdesk server that hosted a ghost cast server which our helpdesk department used to deploy desktops. Even though I was a big fan of ghost I knew that it was out-dated and I heard that Microsoft’s WDS was much better than its predecessor (RIS). I decided to try it out. At first I was a little overwhelmed by the setup which was probably due to fact I was use to ghost and not a WDS.
One thing that got me at first is that WDS is kind of like a framework which components can use like SMS. When I first ventured on and installed WDS services I did not now this. After a little searching I realized what I was missing. I needed the “Deployment Toolkit” which contained the “Deployment Workbench”. This is the pretty much the bare minimum and gives you the functionality of deploying an OS along with and applications, updates, drivers, and custom settings. What’s nice is that right in the deployment workbench Microsoft added a section called the Information Center. Here is where Microsoft pretty much gives you step by step instruction along with checking what components are still needed or need updating.
One of the coolest features I found was the ability and the ease to add drivers. They made it very easy. All you do is right click on the Out-of-Box Drivers and select new. Then just choose a folder and the workbench will search for all drivers with in that folder and all sub folders. Very easy. When working with drivers that are in a EXE or msi you will still need to extract them. I use a utility called UniExtract. its free and can extract almost anything. This is very useful when downloading drivers from manufacturers like Dell.
Deploying applications silently can still be a pain but that will never really change I think. If an application you want to install is not an msi or the executable has no switches for silent install I will use one of three different methods of setting up an automated install. I will either use batch, AutoIT, or WininstallLE. I will post some examples of my scripts later.
Another nice feature is the “OS Packages” aka. “updates”. pretty is to setup and a nice way to update the OS while its installing. One down side to this is its slow… very slow. Its nice if its only a few updates but if the OS needs many you will be waiting a long time. To by pass this I just slipstream the updates right into the OS source files. For Windows XP I use nLite (or Vista use vLite). This application has many more abilities but it’s perfect for slipstreaming updates along with drivers right into the install files themselves, and it beats manually slipstreaming the updates manually via command line.
I have not tried the capturing feature or using images yet. And I’m still working on fully understanding how the “Task Sequences” work but as of now.. I like it. It is simple and it does the job good. And if you use nLite to update the OS files the install is fast. And ever better.. its free if you have software assurance with Microsoft. I will make a full guide in the future on WDS if people show interest.
Tags: 
