Server 2008 WDS - this is bollocks

jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
I am currently studying for 70-643 and pretty much try everything in our lab .. First chapter - WDS ...

I mean I love the idea behind it .. took me a while to get all the necessary driver for NIC and Raid but eventually created several boot / install and capture images for 32 and 64 Bit ..

So far so good - what I didn't know / read is that it requires a sysprepped OS .. which is fair enough as I intended to sysprep it anyway .. BUT : What about other partitions ?

We normally have two arrays, the first one has one primary partition and one extended one with two logical volumes for software installations and temp files. The 2nd one is a data partition for things like SQL Databases.

I am working in a hosting company and deploy server on daily basis so WDS was brilliant .. until : You CAN NOT capture other partitions apart of "c:" ... This is just bollocks ...

This is supposed to be an Enterprise tool and I cannot image that using several partitions is a rare thing

</rant>
My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com :p

Comments

  • blargoeblargoe Member Posts: 4,174 ■■■■■■■■■□
    It is possible to use the command line tools like imagex to capture additional partitions and apply the images to partitions. I'm not sure how to automate this using WDS though. I have in the past, just before the part where Windows is going to install in the WDS wizard, did a shift+F10 to bring up a command window, and have a batch file ready that takes care of the custom partitioning and blasting the image of the other partitions that I care about. There's probably a better way, I just haven't had the time to invest in finding it.
    IT guy since 12/00

    Recent: 11/2019 - RHCSA (RHEL 7); 2/2019 - Updated VCP to 6.5 (just a few days before VMware discontinued the re-cert policy...)
    Working on: RHCE/Ansible
    Future: Probably continued Red Hat Immersion, Possibly VCAP Design, or maybe a completely different path. Depends on job demands...
  • jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
    blargoe wrote:
    It is possible to use the command line tools like imagex to capture additional partitions and apply the images to partitions. I'm not sure how to automate this using WDS though. I have in the past, just before the part where Windows is going to install in the WDS wizard, did a shift+F10 to bring up a command window, and have a batch file ready that takes care of the custom partitioning and blasting the image of the other partitions that I care about. There's probably a better way, I just haven't had the time to invest in finding it.

    Problem with Imagex is that you would need to install AIK on the reference server, do you not ?

    Which means after restoring the images you would need to remove it from each deployed server which is kinda crap :)
    My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com :p
  • blargoeblargoe Member Posts: 4,174 ■■■■■■■■■□
    Naw, all you need is to copy imagex.exe to the server that holds the partition and take the image of the partition. Maybe another file or two that it depends on... I dont' remember. I've never installed the AIK on any machine other the administrative workstation from which I built the Vista-based PE images.
    IT guy since 12/00

    Recent: 11/2019 - RHCSA (RHEL 7); 2/2019 - Updated VCP to 6.5 (just a few days before VMware discontinued the re-cert policy...)
    Working on: RHCE/Ansible
    Future: Probably continued Red Hat Immersion, Possibly VCAP Design, or maybe a completely different path. Depends on job demands...
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