mdt & wds

[browolf]

Im confused, mdt & wds seem to do the same thing, apparently re: all my previous questions about wds, turns out we were using mdt (but had wds installed as well) :-S

 

since it had broke I figured I'd start with wds by itself. followed instructions on here, captured an image, when it comes to deploy it back it doesnt work. think boot.wim needs drivers injecting cos there's driver failures in setupapi.log

 

thing is injecting drivers in wds seems to be a massive pain in the ass, whereas mdt pretty much does it itself, put them in a folder, update files in workbench.

 

wondering if I should uninstall wds and just use mdt, it seemed a whole lot easier to manage everything. what's the point of wds then?

Edited January 16, 2009 by browolf

[Guest Guest]

IMO WDS is very bad at what it does, its long winded, needs to boot an OS in order to install another OS and is generally a backwards step in many aspects...

 

Are you deploying Vista? If not id recommend a gander at RIS (WDS legacy) with Autoimage RogueSpear's Forums • Index page

[browolf]

no we're deploying xp

 

turns out you still need wds as mdt doesnt do PXE booting but all you have to do with wds is install the litetouch boot image in the boot section, and then when they network boot the clients automatically connect with mdt.

[Gatt]

MDT is excellent for creating new builds - it can slipstream drivers into Vista so they dont get lost when you Sysprep it, deploy an image automatically depending on its make & model or even its Role.

 

Takes a bit of work at first to get it working, but once configured its a breeze..

[SYNACK]

Agreed, MDT is really good and simplifies a lot of things. It is a easy software layer that takes care of building the deployment images and controling their behavior/content without needing to do everything manually. This then creates a WDS WIM image that contains the right drivers to boot the clients from PXE and look to the MDT network share for machine builds which it can then deploy.

 

The benifit of the whole windows core OS pxe boot is that it takes windows drivers which are in really short supply for quite a few new network cards and/or storage controllers.

Edited January 26, 2009 by SYNACK

[PiqueABoo]

I love MDT.

 

Well apart from that PE network timeout bug which took a while to track down.

 

PXE booting is the trivial bit. I never did get 2K8 WDS to work for me, but all you need are a couple of DHCP options and any old TFTP service.

[rocky]

Im confused, mdt & wds seem to do the same thing, apparently re: all my previous questions about wds, turns out we were using mdt (but had wds installed as well) :-S

 

since it had broke I figured I'd start with wds by itself. followed instructions on here, captured an image, when it comes to deploy it back it doesnt work. think boot.wim needs drivers injecting cos there's driver failures in setupapi.log

 

thing is injecting drivers in wds seems to be a massive pain in the ass, whereas mdt pretty much does it itself, put them in a folder, update files in workbench.

 

wondering if I should uninstall wds and just use mdt, it seemed a whole lot easier to manage everything. what's the point of wds then?

 

Hi

 

Just running through some threads and seen your query BroWolf. It is a shame that it is now 2012 and your original post was 2009. However, I have experience with both technologies, and I would like to point to out that they may be similar in ways, but definitely one is much easier to use. I am a fan of WDS, mainly due to the fact of how it rolls out images. It is just a simple F12 keypress and pxe boot to the network, then choose if you want to capture and image or roll out an image, after this the answer files take care of the rest, right up to the CTRL ALT DELETE screen. Marvellous deployment tool, names the machines, joins them to the domain, activates windows etc....

 

With my experiences with MDT however there is far more work having to be done on the ground and alot of wizards to go through ( which can be dubbed in the bootstrap.ini and config.ini). I have yet to find a way to boot to the deployment share other than USB or CD, which is a pain.

 

The WDS has a driver pool as does MDT. Your original question about having to inject drivers into the boot.wim is easily rectified using WDS. I had similar problems with various models of machine and eventually figured out how to do this, rather quite easily. You do not need to use DISM or any of the WAIK tools to do this. There is a wizard in the WDS console. If you right click on your boot image there is an option to add driver package. All you have to do is get the drivers you need and extract them to folder, and open the wizard and point to the driver folder and voila the boot.wim has the drivers needed injected into it. No more network errors at boot time!!

 

Hope this helps!! Even though it may be 3 years later )

[browolf]

Hi

 

Just running through some threads and seen your query BroWolf. It is a shame that it is now 2012 and your original post was 2009. However, I have experience with both technologies, and I would like to point to out that they may be similar in ways, but definitely one is much easier to use. I am a fan of WDS, mainly due to the fact of how it rolls out images. It is just a simple F12 keypress and pxe boot to the network, then choose if you want to capture and image or roll out an image, after this the answer files take care of the rest, right up to the CTRL ALT DELETE screen. Marvellous deployment tool, names the machines, joins them to the domain, activates windows etc....

 

With my experiences with MDT however there is far more work having to be done on the ground and alot of wizards to go through ( which can be dubbed in the bootstrap.ini and config.ini). I have yet to find a way to boot to the deployment share other than USB or CD, which is a pain.

 

The WDS has a driver pool as does MDT. Your original question about having to inject drivers into the boot.wim is easily rectified using WDS. I had similar problems with various models of machine and eventually figured out how to do this, rather quite easily. You do not need to use DISM or any of the WAIK tools to do this. There is a wizard in the WDS console. If you right click on your boot image there is an option to add driver package. All you have to do is get the drivers you need and extract them to folder, and open the wizard and point to the driver folder and voila the boot.wim has the drivers needed injected into it. No more network errors at boot time!!

 

Hope this helps!! Even though it may be 3 years later )

 

Thanks! Although we gave up with that and use fog server now { http://www.fogproject.org/ }

[chazzy2501]

If you right click on your boot image there is an option to add driver package. All you have to do is get the drivers you need and extract them to folder, and open the wizard and point to the driver folder and voila the boot.wim has the drivers needed injected into it. No more network errors at boot time!!

 

errr. I don't get this option.

[DMcCoy]

errr. I don't get this option.

 

2008 R2?

[computer_expert]

errr. I don't get this option.

 

It's there in the 2008R2 version of WDS.

 

Edit: was beaten by DMCcoy, but it was a new feature in 2008R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd735188%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

Edited March 5, 2012 by computer_expert

[EvLPhenom]

@browolf I did exactly the same here. Think fog is a great peice of software and just sits there until I need to do something, then just schedule the lot to image and job done, practically zero touch for computers. Laptops have to have some bits done but nothing major. I was very pleased with it compared to when we used Ghost.

[SYNACK]

I have yet to find a way to boot to the deployment share other than USB or CD, which is a pain.

 

Just add the lightouch.wim from the MDT share, this boots it just like WDS with f12 but with all the additional functionlity afforded by MDT.

[rocky]

Sorry should have said that we are using R2 SP1 Systems which does have extra functionality. It still can be achieved by using WAIK system Image manager. Have just started a new project, purely on a test pilot basis. Have SCCM up and running but only at early stages, have managed to deploy the client agent and some software packages to clients. Trying to get OS deployment configured...it's pain staking and frustrating.... anyone know of any good articles on OSD using SCCM 2007??

 

Cheers!