Windows 7 Deployment

[reprised]

Hi all,

 

We are going to start imaging some of our machines with Win7 (I know, it's about time we did) and was just after some tips on how you guys do it. We have a Fog server so we will try that first as it seems to work very well for our WinXP boxes. I will also try creating images in virtualbox as previously we used physical machines and that was a chore and a half. Do you guys have any tips on best practice when creating Win7 images. Are there any useful bits of software you always install on your images or configuration changes to your setup?

 

Thanks for your help

[RTFM]

WDS and MDT are brilliant for deployment

 

Chuck a KMS server into the mix and life's a breeze

[Fazza]

WDS and MDT are brilliant for deployment

 

Chuck a KMS server into the mix and life's a breeze

 

I've just started playing with those and they work very well. Symantec Ghost still works OK if you dont have Server 2008 available to use too.

[qcomer]

I've just started playing with those and they work very well. Symantec Ghost still works OK if you dont have Server 2008 available to use too.

 

MDT and WDS can be installed on Server 2003 also. Server 2008 is not a requirement.

[SYNACK]

MDT and WDS can be installed on Server 2003 also. Server 2008 is not a requirement.

I can attest to that, we used it back when pushing out Vista at one site.

[IanT]

Agree with the above, MDT and WDS when setup correctly is cool!

[Dan_ATR]

We have just set up a 2008 R2 server with WDS. From this we used WAIK so that we could use WSIM. From WSIM we then made a WinPE unattended.xml for the PE end (this inc the partitioning of the hard disk) and then we used another .xml to define the windows 7 deployment.

 

After this we then used GP to define what the UI looks like and also what permissions, restrictions the users had.

 

We also use GP to deploy software. If you have any questions please PM me.

[john]

MDT for us works great

[adhutton]

We use WDS and have recently re-imaged 420 PCs with very few problems. It's really good.

 

Andrew

[cpjitservices]

MDT & WDS here - FOG as a backup if for some reason the first 2 dont work.