I’ve just finished typing up a whitepaper on Windows Deployment Services (WDS). This will replace RIS on Windows 2003 SP2 and will be included instead of RIS in WIndows “Longhorn”. This guide will serve as a primer to WDS and Windows Vista deployment via one of Microsoft’s recommended mechanisms.
Since Windows 2000 Server, we have had a technology available to us from Microsoft to quickly, and with little effort, build machines via the network. This technology was called Remote Installation Services or RIS. Few have ever heard of RIS. For most, it’s one of those subjects that only comes up in a few MCP exam questions. However, a few of us found this technology to be very useful.
What was RIS? RIS mixes the unattended setup, with network installations via a PXE boot up. Most of us will know PXE as that annoying prompt asking you to press <F12> to boot from the network. If you have RIS set up, you can press <F12>, log into a client, select an “image” (which is really an I386 folder associate with an unattended answer script) and walk away knowing that your PC would be built and added to your domain without any further effort on your part. Added to that, using an extension of RIS called RIPREP, you could actually deploy images of PC’s that included applications in them.
This sounds a bit like Ghost? Slightly, but it is different. Ghost is a bit level cloning tool. It also requires licensing for every machine that you build … something many organisations choose to ignore, I’m fairly sure. It also requires that you be careful with SID duplication so you have to make use of tools such as SYSPREP. Plain RIS images are really nothing more than a copy of the I386 folder from the Operating System CD, maybe some drivers added, and one or maybe a set of answer files for performing an automated or completely unattended setup. It’s not a clone at all; it’s a traditional setup. How doe RIS and Ghost compare? Ghost is quicker for deploying operating systems but it does cost money to use legally. RIS is free to use but does take slightly longer to deploy the operating system. An added advantage of RIS is that its close integration into Windows and Active Directory allow you to join the computer to the domain, choose the OU where the computer account should be placed and use customisable computer naming standard using Active Directory as your database.
Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 brings about a change for RIS users. Due to the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft is replacing RIS with Windows Deployment Services. WDS will provide legacy support for RIS (it upgrades cleanly) but it will also provide support for WinPE deployments of Vista’s Windows Imaging (WIM) file format via PXE deployments. WDS will also be a part of Windows “Longhorn” Server.
With this document, I hope to describe some of the fundamentals of WDS as included with Windows 2003 Service Pack 2.
Note: This document is based on the Beta Refresh of Windows 2003 Service Pack 2.
The document continues …