Today is a brief post on how to use WDS to deploy images. WDS can best be compared to Symantec Ghost. You could set up a base install, install all the software and applications, patches, updates etc. You could then apply some configuration changes and once finished you can then sysprep the environment, capture it and use WDS to deploy that image. My experience with it has been MDT for your daily rebuilds. Where you have a project where you need to build 100+ machines, then you might want to consider building your environment and then using WDS to capture and deploy it. Ill leave that decision up to you.
On every Windows DVD since Vista, Microsoft has used the image based installer method. If you load up any Vista or higher Windows DVD and head to the Source folder there are 2 files we are interested in. Boot.wim and Install.wim. The boot.wim file is the windows image file that contains the Windows PE environment used for interacting with the user and installing the Windows Image. Install.wim is the Full Windows operating system image that is deployed.
First up we will be loading the boot.wim file from our Windows DVD. Do note that you can use 1 boot.wim file to deploy multiple Windows install.wims. You will need to ensure that you have the latest boot.wim file from the latest operating system . In this example I will be using the boot.wim from a Windows 10 DVD. This boot.wim will allow me to deploy a Windows 7 and 8.1 install.wim (where as if I used the 8.1 boot.wim I would not be able to deploy the Windows 10 image).
Here is
Right clicking on the Install Images container and choosing “add image” asks you to create an image group if you dont already have any defined. Because we are only loading the standard install.wim files I will call this group “Standard Iso Disks”
Our first install.wim file we will be loading will be from the Windows 10 disk. As you can see below the file is contained in the sources folder.
Here you get to select the Image you wish to load. Windows Desktop operating systems tend to have 1 image. If you loaded up the Server 2012 install.wim you would have 4 options here as they are all loaded into the same image file.
Here I will also load a Windows 7 Pro install.wim
And as you can see my final results after also uploading the Windows 8.1 Enterprise install.wim
And once again, we have uploaded our boot.wim from the windows 10 disk into the Boot Images container. This file is capable of deploying all 3 install.wim files we uploaded to the install images area.
Our next post will look at a few more configuration screenshots before moving on to deploying an image via WDS