Preparing Windows Images for Mass Deployment
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There’s nothing more frustrating than a massive deployment through computers having totally different specifications. Some sort of automation is a must; we can’t expect system administrators to install the operating system on each and every system when their count reaches up to the hundreds, thousands, and maybe more. This is the second part of our two-part series covering mass deployment techniques.
The first segment of this series was titled “Slipstreamed and Unattended Windows Installations” and you can find it published here on ASP Free. In that article we presented the popular slipstreaming strategy that allows administrators to integrate service packs, security patches, hot-fixes, and hardware drivers into the Windows installation. Moreover, tips on creating an unattended setup were also explained.
In this part we are going to focus on a different approach. Microsoft released a tool called System Preparation Utility, abbreviated Sysprep, specifically designed to “prepare the system” for use as a reference source later on for disk- or partition- cloning tasks. With the help of Sysprep, the system-specific information is eliminated from the reference system; thus it can be used machine independently as a template.
The main difference between the approach described in the first segment and this one is quite clear: slipstreamed and unattended installations are just “scripting an automated” setup: everything will be installed from scratch normally without requiring user interaction. With Sysprep, we prepare a reference image that is ready to be cloned and massively deployed on hundreds of computers of all kinds.
As a matter of fact, the second technique barely takes a few minutes if we exclude the time required while we prepare the reference source image. Once we have finished the process and we have the image ready, cloning it on a huge number of computers simultaneously (via multi-cast, for example) may take less than a few minutes because the image is written sector-by-sector on the hard drives.
Now that we understand the difference between these routes, let’s move on.
Next: Sysprep in Action >>
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