Hands-on with Windows Deployment Services
Well I’ve been using Microsoft’s Windows Vista for a little while now and the other day we took delivery of our first Vista PC’s. Coupled with the release of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, this gave me the perfect opportunity to take a look at one of the more interesting parts of this service pack, Windows Deployment Services.
Anyone who’s ever used RIS before will know it to be somewhat… tricky. I’ve tended to use PowerQuest’s DeployCenter (acquired by Symantec a few years ago now) for it’s speedy client imaging and excellent PXE boot environment. Now, however, with Windows Deployment Services, it appears that Microsoft have brought something to the market – for free no less – to really help the sysadmin out, whether they be installing one or a hundred PC’s.
So, how easy is it to install and work with Windows Deployment Services? More importantly, how easy is it to actually get the job of installing an OS to a client? Well, let’s find out.
Installing Service Pack 2, which includes Windows Deployment Services, was an absolute doddle. On my virtual server (yes, I do love VMware) I ensured I followed the pre-requisites – a Windows Server 2003 machine with Remote Installation Services installed. Note at this point you don’t have to bother configuring RIS – it’s a bit of a waste of time if you know you’re installing WDS!
So, after the customary reboot, off we go to configure WDS. You’ll spot a new MMC in your Administrative Tools folder, called, helpfully, "Windows Deployment Services". Opening this up will give you the chance to connect to a server (in this case localhost) and, if it’s not configured, to configure it. Right-clicking on your server name gives you the "Configure" option, nice and easy. A quick three-stage wizard takes you through where to store your images and to choose how your server responds to PXE boot clients. All very easy; I chose my D: drive and a folder called "RemoteInstall" and told my server to respond to all requests. As this is a lab I can’t be arsed with pre-staging my clients, but when I come to roll this out across my domain I’m thinking pre-staging would be the way to go.
So, there we go! Windows Deployment Services all up and running, hurrah! Right, now to add an image. Er… ah. What do we do here? This bit actually confused me for a while as the introduction documentation to WDS states "add your boot images here", which wasn’t particularly helpful for me. Fortunately, having been at a Technet roadshow earlier this week (yes, sad I know) I remembered a litte thing about the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK). So, off I went and downloaded this – all 996Mb of it – as I knew I needed Windows PE to continue. "What’s Windows PE?" I hear ooh, probably the one person that reads this post ask. I’m not going to go into the Windows Pre-execution Environment here, as Microsoft do a pretty good job. I’ll just say it’s the way to do remote and unattended Windows installs and how you perform system maintenance. Windows PE has always been availabe to those of us with Volume Licensing and Software assurance; Microsoft have now very kindly made it available to the public at large to really help push automated and customised Vista deployments.
Just a slight rant at this point – why supply the file in an .img file? What’s wrong with an .iso, or even a .vhd disk? Fortunately VMware Workstation 6 beta supports mounting .img files as CD or DVD drives for a guest – very useful when the machine I was working on didn’t have a writeable DVD drive.
Anyway, rant over. So, time to install the Windows AIK. Take two seconds to read the readme – otherwise you’ll do what I did, and completely ignore installing the pre-requisites of the .NET Framework 2.0 and MSXML 6.0. You’ll get an error message if you try and install the AIK, so you won’t mess anything up, but every time I get an error message I feel just that little bit more stupid (and I really can’t afford to go that much lower). Once you’ve done this, Windows AIK installs quickly, easily and painlessly.
Hurrah! Now you have the WAIK and WDS installed, you can start using images. Easy as pie, now you can add the standard Windows PE images by going through the WDS MMC snap-in, right-clicking on the "Boot Images" node, choosing "Add Boot Image" and then navigating to %program files%\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools, choosing the subfolder of the architecture you want (I only bothered with x86 but the WAIK supplies an x64 version too – don’t know what’s happened to the ia64 version, but I highly doubt anyone who has an Itanium2 and is trying to do this is reading my blog…).
Anyway, whoopee-doo! Boot a PC from the network and it will boot up in Windows PE. You’ll see a command box beavering away initialising the network and then… nothing. Just the X:\Windows\System32> prompt. Hmm. So, how do we make this useful? Well, there’s quite a lot of system tools here – it’s the equivalent of booting into "Safe mode with Command Prompt" so you can use tools like diskpart and so on. By default there’s also the WDSCapture command, which will allow you to take an image of the PC you’re working on. All very fine and dandy, but is there a way we can choose to automatically capture an image of a PC, without all this faffing around?
Fortunately for us, there is indeed. Going back to your server, choose your boot image, right-click on it and select "Create Capture Image". This bit is a little counter-intuitive; you have to first create the image to the file system and then add it back into WDS as another boot image.
Reboot your PC and you get the choice of which images to boot – your original image or your newly-created image – and if you’ve remembered to SysPrep the PC this is running on you’ll be able to capture a volume as an image, ready for deployment through WDS.
Easy! Next up, taking and deploying both Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 images…
This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Software. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: wds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday, March 30, 2007 at 12:21 am Sean wrote:
Hello Rob,
Thanks for the info regarding this, I am trying to set up WDS so that I can image Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition for use with VMware Server so I don’t have to constantly be configuring them by hand. :) Looking forward to the continuation of this blog.
Keep up the great work!
Sean
on Sunday, April 1, 2007 at 12:17 pm Rob wrote:
Hi Sean,
First off thanks for the kind comments!
Just about Windows Server w/VMware – I’m not sure you can use WDS to image Windows Server (although I’ll certainly be giving it a go!). If the images are for VMware, I tend to use a combination of SysPrep followed by VMware’s Clone function – install Windows in a VMware guest as usual, stick on all the software you need, use SysPrep (and write an unattended setup file to make things even easier) and then take a clone when the guest OS powers down. You can then save this clone and use it to create any number of Windows Server images you require, set up exactly the way you want them.
You can create two different types of clones – either linked or independent. I tend to use independent (never know when I might delete something by accident) but by creating linked clones you can reduce the amount of disk space you require, if space is an issue for you.
Hope this helps,
Rob
on Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 1:09 pm John wrote:
Hi Rob:
Okay, I’m confused!??
I choose network boot, the PC boots up to a command prompt, just like you described. Then I create the capture image and add it back into the boot image. I should get a choice between the boot image and the capture image. But it just boots up to the capture image.
I’m not understanding something or something is not right (probably both). And yes, your blog is read by more than two people. :)
Regards,
John
on Thursday, April 12, 2007 at 10:42 am Rob wrote:
Hi John,
Yep, there is an extra step you have to do – you need to add a Discovery boot image to your Deployment Services server. I wrote another post (http://robwhitehouse.com/software/creating-images-with-windows-deployment-services/) detailing how I went about adding this boot image. You can also use your original WinPE w/command line to do the imaging but this isn’t something I’ve played with yet – too complicated and time consuming for my needs!!
Hope this helps,
Rob
on Friday, April 13, 2007 at 1:24 am Barry wrote:
Rob,
thanks for your previous articles on WDS. First of all I they saved me a lot of time, as some parts of the MS doco are a bit sketchy to say the least. Don’t know how long it would have taken to get it going without your articles to guide me.
Regarding using WDS to image a W2K3 SE R2 server, I’m pretty sure it will work, as I imaged a W2K3 SE server with SP2. Had some issues (below), other than that it worked a treat. On to BDD 2007 now…
Gotchas:
1. Needed to trawl for a boot.wim on the web, as I didn’t have the Vista media available with the necessary boot image (inc. WDS binaries).
2. Not sure if it would have been an issue (but didn’t feel like finding out the hard way), downloaded the latest version of sysprep from MS that is documented as supporting W2K3 SP2 & R2.
Thanks again for your articles,
Barry
on Saturday, April 14, 2007 at 10:47 am Rob wrote:
Hi Barry,
Thanks for the info – I know with Windows XP SP2 there was a specific hotfix level it had to be at before you could use WDS to deploy it – great to hear you can do the same with Windows Server. Like you yes, I don’t like finding out the hard way that something’s not going to work!
Hadn’t seen Business Desktop Deployment 2007 – will have to see if WDS is good enough for the environment I’m working in or whether we need more control.
Cheers,
Rob
on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 7:43 pm Sergio wrote:
Hi,
Great site. Helped me a lot but i’m having problems whith the drive imaging.
I boot to the Capture image but I’ve tried 3 differente computers and so far I’m unable to do an image capture.
The volumes drop-down is always empty.
Can anyone help me?
regards
on Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 4:44 pm Rob wrote:
Hi Sergio,
On your clients are you running SysPrep before trying to capture the image? From my understanding, the client has to be either Windows Vista, Windows XP with SP2 or Windows Server 2003 SP2 – and the client has to have had SysPrep run on it prior to taking the image.
Hope this helps,
Rob
on Friday, April 27, 2007 at 5:45 pm Artur wrote:
Hi,
I have the same problem Sergio did.
I have run sysprep before trying to capture the image, but the drop down is empty.
In Microsoft documentation the sysprep syntax is only for windows Vista. What´s the correct syntax for XP?
Thanks
Artur
on Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 6:13 pm James wrote:
Similar issue for me, although I’m able to select the volume to capture. My issue is that when i’m choosing the Image Capture Destination, I choose to upload to the WDS server, type in the name and connect, select the image group name, but the finish button is grayed out. Ideas???
on Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 8:09 pm Rob wrote:
James, Artur;
Really sorry but I haven’t seen this behaviour at all on either of the WDS servers I’ve built – the only thing I can suggest is checking that your network drivers are supported in Vista (which they obviously are if you can choose an image group), that you have permissions to write to that directory and that you’re using the latest, fully patched version of Windows XP/2003 along with the absolute latest version of SysPrep.
As I say I haven’t been able to replicate this problem myself but if I do, I’ll post a solution here.
Sorry I can’t be any more help,
Rob
on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 3:05 pm gusgormen wrote:
Hey
On the capture page, You need to select local drive for the image ie c:\image.wim, then also select upload to WDS server. This will create the wim file on the server. then you can use the WDS Gui to add another image, you can then boot to the PXE environment and select the image that you have addedd. Remember that the machine you boot with can only see an image with equivalent HAL.
I have an issue with converting some RIPREP images, base images ie only windows installed and it works fine, if the the riprep image contains other installs ie office, the conversion fails with either a code 0×80360051 or access denied. Anyone had that too and been successful in converting. its very frustrating.
logging is awful, and none too helpful
on Friday, May 25, 2007 at 12:26 pm Jonathan wrote:
To run sysprep in Win XP SP2 i downloaded the updated sysprep package from MS and put in on a cd and i copy the whole dir to the c: drive on the machine im trying to image and then run setupmgr and configure the sysprep.inf and then run sysprep from that dir…it pops up with a gui and all and then you can choose either to shutdown or reboot.
the problem with the finish being greyed out is because you have to select a local destination (1st option on the screen) and then the finish will show up….took me forever yesterday to figure that one out.
on Wednesday, June 13, 2007 at 5:42 am Rahul wrote:
Hi Rob,
Thanks for the article, it is well written and descriptive. I have followed this and created a boot image and capture image. Syspreped windows xp and created an image using capture image, copied this to WDS and created install image now my problem is that i am not able to view this install image in the OS chooser am i missing anything (i have not used discovery image since i thought it is used for creating cd s etc) Your help is appreciated.
Cheers,
Rahul
on Monday, June 18, 2007 at 10:03 pm Brian wrote:
To get the Volume to populate when doing a Windwos XP Capture you need to run Sysprep with the mini-set and reseal options or command switches. This will allow you to choose your XP disk. Also indeed for some reason you have to populate a local destination, even when uploading an image to wds.
on Monday, June 25, 2007 at 3:44 pm Jake wrote:
Howdy! Thanks for the great post! I’m trying to deploy this in a production environment, and my setup is slightly different than yours in that my RIS server is seperate from my DHCP server. Can you shed any light on this issue? Both servers are joined to the domain, but the clients never get a boot filename.
Thanks!
on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 4:09 pm joe wrote:
what about using riprep on the pc that you are trying to image? Is this still going to work on WDS>? thanks
on Monday, November 26, 2007 at 12:02 pm theruck wrote:
hi
i have the same behaviour – the capture image does nto show the partition to create the image from. i thouight it is because of some missing drivers for the ICH9 controller but i injected them into the image with no better result.
anyone has got a solution for this?
on Monday, February 18, 2008 at 4:15 pm A5Ben wrote:
I have successfully captured an XP image to my WDS server but I cannot figure out how to redeploy it. Can anyone share how they did this?
Thanks!
on Monday, February 18, 2008 at 8:31 pm bKTbo wrote:
In the WDS console under install images, right click and choose to add new install image. Browse to the location of the .wim file that you created when you ran the capture.
Add name and description info and you should be set.
on Friday, March 7, 2008 at 1:59 pm BootPee wrote:
Hi!
Just a quick comment to your problem with .img vs .iso images. They’re the same. Just rename .img to .iso and automagically you have a fully working .iso file :)
on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 3:26 pm Jim wrote:
Is there any way you might be willing to give instructions on WDS using Server 2008?
on Monday, May 18, 2009 at 8:17 am Rob wrote:
Jim – it’s pretty much identical really. Just enable the WDS role in Server Manager.
The only difference in 2008 is the great multicast feature!
on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 8:36 am am wrote:
yep,Jim,to make the server roles as WDS,just enable it from server role.Choose the windows deployment services.
or if not mistaken ServerManagerCmd -installWDS for its command line.
but Rob,
one quick question,i still could not find out how to create image .wim for WinXP.
as far i knew,we have to create boot and install images,for any image that i would like to add.
looking forward to hear your reply