We are going to pick up where we left off from our last post. We just need to touch up on a couple of configuration items in order to ensure our WDS behaves in a specific way. If you right click on your WDS server in the management console below and choose properties. The General and PXE Response tabs can be left as is. If you have integrated WDS with AD you can specify a couple of things here. The first is the device naming policy. You can find a very good article at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771624.aspx but for this lab you can use a 3 letter acronym to describe your environment (I use JHS here) and then DPC (for desktop PC) and then a numbering system %03# which will generate a 3 digit number and count upwards. So the first PC that WDS services for me will be named JHSDPC001.
You can also specify where in your AD it will deposit the domain joined PC.
The boot tab has a couple of options. I recommend leaving it as is but I just wanted to point out that if you wanted to get rid of the “press F12” to network boot you can do it here. You can also specify specific default boot images based upon what type of device architecture. Once again not really anything to play around with here if you are just looking to keep things as simple as possible.
The Client tab also can be left as it is.
This last tab is important if (and only if) you install your WDS server on your DHCP server. If you do you need to put ticks in both these boxes. If not you can safely ignore this tab.
Once that is all set up lets head to our deployment VM to test it out. Pressing F12 will connect you to the WDS server. If you have multiple boot images loaded you will get a selection screen. For this demonstration we will be selecting the MS Windows 10 Setup which is the boot.wim file located on the Windows 10 DVD.
Ok so upon selecting that we get a very lite Windows Setup Menu. Type in your network credentials and away we go
Now here you can see the 3 images we uploaded from our last post. Windows 7 pro, 8.1 Enterprise and 10 Enterprise
And those familiar with going through the DVD install you will be presented with this. NOTE! You will need to have drivers available for Disk and Network in the WDS environment if your hardware has trouble network booting, or seeing this screen.
So here we have a quick Windows 8.1 setup. If you note that upon install it has joined the domain already. Because we arent specifying an unattend.xml file it still asks us for our Region and Locale settings.
And this time through lets select our Windows 10 Enterprise install.
And once again the same input screens as our 8.1 install above, but this time for Windows 10.
And lastly our domain joined Windows 10 base image install
And that brings us to the end of our Windows Deployment guide. Just to summarise that this is a very basic look at how WDS works and how we can quickly whip up a network boot of a Windows installer over the network. No need to carry around a DVD to install the operating system. Just network boot from the device and away you go. Join us in our next post as we delve into a basic Windows 10 deployment via MDT.