Deploying Vista

I know a few of you guys are sysadmins and have had to do this before, so I request your great experience.

At work we want to image over 100 computers with Windows Vista (I know). Normally we would hand image each computer, but we all know how much of a pain that is, so we looked into deploying it in a different fashion.

First, the images were made using symantic ghost, so we trying ghost casting, but it appears ghost was not made to do this and we could not get it to work.

I wanted to deploy it over a network like what is mentioned in the MCTS books, likely but I am unfamiliar with the process, and again, these are pre-made images, and were not made using the windows tool.

HELP!

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Comments

earweed

What Server system do you have available? Do you have Windows Server 2008?

Daniel333

Hey there,

If you need to deploy to more than one workstation at a time you need to first ensure that your switches support Multicast. A misconfigured switch will treat a multicast as a broadcast if not.

Then if you have Windows 2003R2 or higher installed Windows Deployment Services, free. It's pretty easy. Get your licensing in order and build your base workstation. Upload to WDS and down then enable it.

Go to each workstation and PXE boot, run the install. Done! Place the computers in the correct OU's to have a GPO make any changes you might need.

Works great for Vista, 2008 and 7.

WDS is pretty easy, any book will cover it. But if you need video training TrainSignal's 70-640 covered it.

SephStorm

This would be completely off the production network, so I can use 2003/8.

I will see if our switch supports multicast. What do you mean by building my base Workstation?

[Deleted User]

It is often referred to as a reference image or machine. You want a machine that is setup how you want to deploy it.. software, drivers, etc. installed then you sysprep it and deploy that image from the WDS server.

forkvoid

SephStorm wrote: »

I know a few of you guys are sysadmins and have had to do this before, so I request your great experience.

At work we want to image over 100 computers with Windows Vista (I know). Normally we would hand image each computer, but we all know how much of a pain that is, so we looked into deploying it in a different fashion.

First, the images were made using symantic ghost, so we trying ghost casting, but it appears ghost was not made to do this and we could not get it to work.

I wanted to deploy it over a network like what is mentioned in the MCTS books, likely but I am unfamiliar with the process, and again, these are pre-made images, and were not made using the windows tool.

HELP!

That's exactly what Ghost can do, using the Ghostcast utility. Create a boot CD/USB disk via the Ghost Network Boot Utility. Start the Ghostcast session and away you go. I recommend skimming the manual, at least.

Though, I do agree with everyone else: WDS is the absolute best way to go for Windows deployment(though, I actually use it to deploy Linux too), but if you already a Ghost image, then work with what you have.

SephStorm

we couldnt get ghostcast to work. We had a PC set up with the ghost server app running on it and a test image. We had one pc hooked up to a router so we could get IP addresses (we previously had problems with that) Anyway, the pc had a ghost cd and was booted off the cd, but we could not connect to the ghostcasting session. We were close, we were able to get the pcs on the same subnet, they could ping each other, but no luck entering the session. Maybe it was the multicast vs broadcast situation.

I may see what we can do about installing the image on one PC and making a new one through WDS.

manny355

I really haven't had to much experience with WDS...although it sounds interesting...

We use Ghost on a daily basis to accomplish what you are trying to do.

I used to work at another company that used ghost to deploy images over the network...and the image was located on a server in another city.

So bottom line is that ghost can do it.

With the company that I work for now...we have the ghostcast server in a local office and use it to deploy no less than 20 different images to various machines desktop/laptops...we keep a library of base images...then when we get new machines we image them with the company approved image and deploy to the field...just the other day I imaged like 50 laptops...once its up and running ghost is really simple to deploy in scenarios like that.

earweed

WDS works just as easily.