WDS on school domain, no VLANS

[jmak]

Hi, as per title........

 

I've been playing with WDS/MDT for a while and have never quite got there, but I've broken my FOG implementation, so now need an imaging solution sharpish. I've been playing on a test network at home where there is no domain set up. It seems that it is intended to work on a domain. I now have my server virtualised (probably deserves a post in cool things!), so can add servers to my domain without compromising my DC or requiring extra hardware. So my question:

 

If I add a virtual server to my domain to run WDS, what happens when I deploy an image? What stops it deploying to my existing clients which are running perfectly happily? Are there any other gotchas to look out for when adding WDS to a live network? We have a flat LAN - no vLANs if that makes a difference.

 

Thanks..........

[beany1]

I may be reading this wrong...but WDS on its own won't do anything to your clients until you specifically boot PXE on them, then login and then deploy your image.

[jmak]

I may be reading this wrong...but WDS on its own won't do anything to your clients until you specifically boot PXE on them, then login and then deploy your image.

 

I have quite a few of our clients set to pxe boot from when I was using FOG. Will this mean that I need to manually enable and disable PXE boot on the clients when I want to image/re-image? Or is there a way of excluding clients?

[beany1]

Sorry no clue on using FOG. If you have a client set to first boot device in BIOS as PXE it will load windows install from WDS - it won't do anything until you input username password etc.

But if you have first boot to local disk etc. on client it will just boot into windows or whatever just fine, then when you need to use it on a client just use F12 to boot from network.

[Valyyn]

On ours, you have to push F12 to actually launch in to WDS and once there you then have to select an image etc if you have more than one.

[jmak]

Sorry no clue on using FOG. If you have a client set to first boot device in BIOS as PXE it will load windows install from WDS - it won't do anything until you input username password etc.

But if you have first boot to local disk etc. on client it will just boot into windows or whatever just fine, then when you need to use it on a client just use F12 to boot from network.

 

In FOG, you set which clients you want to deploy to in the management console, so I can have all of the clients set to PXE boot as first device and only those specified would pick up the install - the rest don't find anything to PXE boot from. I appreciate that there's not always a direct equivalent when changing systems, just didn't want to set it up and suddenly having half my clients being re-imaged!

 

When you say a username and password is required before anything happens, is that a specific password for WDS? (i.e. What happens if a user enters their normal domain password - not domain admin) And if no password is entered, will the client boot as normal?

 

Thanks

[beany1]

As far as I'm aware WDS on its own isn't capable of zero touch installations.

 

If the first device is PXE it will sit and wait in WDS, the user would have to cancel - which would reboot and it would go back into WDS.

 

I think by default its set up to allow anyone to start it, but apparently you can change the security groups of the images to only allow certain groups.

[jmak]

 

I think by default its set up to allow anyone to start it, but apparently you can change the security groups of the images to only allow certain groups.

 

Now that sounds promising - along the same lines as deploying software. I'm reassured that I'm not going to be inundated with users having windows reinstalled when they log on to take the trendsetter in the morning. That would make me unpopular!

 

Thanks again.

[mikkydoos]

F12 is the one.

 

Be aware of this... I could never get WDS running on a VM unless the images were stored within the VM. i.e. mine won't deploy if images are not stored on a 'local' drive.

 

It munches up disk space.

 

A SAN may be different. I was trying to store images on a NAS with a mapped drive and it wouldn't have it.