CONFUSED about OS deployment

[sappling]

Hi all,

Fisrtly I apologise becasue I am a Noob to all of this. I am after some advice and pointin gin the right direction. My current deployment strategy is as goes .... I install XP with all the latest patches, drivers, plugins, third party software such as Serif, Game Maker etc I then take and image with Symantec ghost (this is so i can edit it later if needs be). I then Sysprep the machine and take another image and call it e.g. image_sysprepped.

Now we are planning on phasing in some windows 7 machines and as I am aware they have brough tout WAIK. I have used this and can get a windows 7 machine to add to the domain etc but I can't seem to find anywhere I can install the third party software. Does this mean I need to install all my third party stuff from MSI and is my old method redundant or am I just missing something.

Kind Regards

SAP

[sted]

if your version of ghost is new enough you can continue doing what you are doing it does work but its not the way id go

in a similar vane you can make one image per pc type using wds and then just use that to deploy to pcs instead of ghost

the method im now heading towards. set up a vm with win7 (whatever edition you are using be it pro/ent/x86/x64) install updates to that and any software you use in the base image (i personally prefer to msi out software rather than have it in a base image but its swings and roundabouts). snapshot the vm BEFORE you sysprep it. Install wds, waik and mdt on a server. use mdt to "pull" a syspreped version of your vm. You now have a "one size fits all" base image. Add all the drivers you need to mdt and then you can fire out the image to any pc that will take it and it will install appropriate drivers and so on. the only thing you may miss from ghost is ive not found a reliable way of getting pcs to autojoin a domain AND have the right name i can seem to get them to join but only with random names and the task has to be started from the client but i te3nd to find more often than not im rebuilding odd pcs rather than a bunch at once

[morganw]

If you want to do things the Microsoft way look at MDT2010.
If you want something more similar to Ghost flat imaging look at FOG (new version should be out later this month).
Both can do application installations. MDT has the fancy driver injection that makes image maintenance easier and you don't even have to start with a machine to capture, you can deploy the WIM file from the Windows install media and incorporate updates with WSUS as part of the task sequence.

[mdench]

if you've got a spare machine laying around you could install it with linux and install FOG onto the machine.. then create a windows 7 image with all the necessary software from either another or a vm use fog to pull an image off the machine and then so long as the machines are set up with network booting they PXE boot to the fog server and can pull the windows 7 image from that onto the machine

[jmcdermott]

If it is the sysprep part you are having difficulty with try this guide it helped me.

Network Management: Deploying Windows 7 to a domain