The Windows Deployment blog lists a number of changes in how Windows OS deployment will change with Windows 7, and probably Windows Server 2008 R2. Don’t worry, it’s not like the massive change from the text based systems of WNT/W2K/WXP to "Panther" in Vista and W2008. MS are making modifications and improvements to the current system which they claim will make it easier and quicker to deploy. Some of these include:
- DISM sounds like it’s replacing WISM and will include more tools, e.g. ImageX.
- Using Diskpart to mount offline VHD’s, e.g "surfacing" them.
- WinPE is changing. ImageX moves into DISM and the default WPE image contains no functionality.
- WinRE (Recovery Environment) is installed on the OS by default.
- A tiny hidden BitLocker volume is created by default.
- Moving upwards between versions of Windows 7 shouldn’t require a reinstall/upgrade. Functionality is hidden depending on the license key you use.
- Speaking of which: manually entered license keys are not entered during setup anymore. This allows lab/evaluation work. You now enter them afterwards.
- WAIK is supposed to be improving.
Other new stuff to expect include
- WDS in Windows Server 2008 R2 will include multicast with multiple stream transfer. This means that faster clients can work on one stream and slower clients can work on another. Your localised network/NIC/disk bottlenecks won’t slow down everyone at once.
- Dynamic Driver Provisioning will allow you to store client drivers on the WDS server and hopefully remove messy image updating – that scares many people away. Drivers are downloaded at install time.
- WDS VHD Native Boot: VHD Native Boot uses a Virtual Hard Disk to store an OS and it’s applications/data. The VHD is deployed to a machine. The machine has a small boot up partition for the essential files to start the machine. The second partition is where a VHD (or many VHD’s) are located. The VHD is mounted as a volume and the machine boots from it’s contents. WDS will be able to deploy these VHD’s. This makes for "fungible" machines, i.e. a user’s computing environment is tied to the VHD and not the hardware.