I’ve been doing the last bits of preparing for my Windows User Group session on deploying Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (details here and LiveMeeting webcast here) for this Friday (December 4th, 09:30 GMT – it’ll be recorded).
I’ve been trying out a few of the features of Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Deployment Services (WDS), a free OS image capture/deployment solution from Microsoft. Some of the new features are:
- Driver additions to the boot image are really easy.
- Setting up multicast is really easy too.
- Clients can join a multicast midway and then get the rest of the stream afterwards.
- You can configure a multicast to only initiate when a session has enough computers or at a certain date/time.
- You can allow no computers or all computers access to WDS.
- You can allow new computers to access WDS two ways. The first (old) one is to pre-build computer accounts in Active Directory with the GUID/MAC of the physical machine to build. Or, you can delay a boot up until the end user calls the helpdesk and gets and administrator to approve their session in the WDS console.