Update on OHA Rollout Project

Wes Kroesbergen — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:58:42 +0000

I’ve finally got the deployment process all worked out at OHA for the time being. I set WDS up (in native mode) on one of our servers. One of the first things I did was take our existing XP SP2 images, deploy them to our hardware, run the updates, and then capture those images (WIM format) to the WDS server. Our co-op student now can PXE boot from any of our standard laptops or desktops, and apply the appropriate image from the network, no longer requiring a floppy to boot from. We’ve also purchased a Vista SP1 OEM disc from one of our vendors, as it will be used as the base for our image. I’ve uploaded that to the WDS server as well, meaning we can now do a PXE install of native Vista SP1. I’ve got the initial dev build of our image up on WDS as well, merely for testing purposes. In total now, we have 4 images available: Laptop XP SP2 image, Desktop XP SP2 image, Vista SP1 OEM Vanilla, and the initial Master Vista SP1 image.
I gave up on the database configuration for new machines in MDT temporarily, as I was running into issues with the deployment boot image not authenticating properly with the server, despite configuring UserID, UserPwd, and UserDomain appropriately in the Boot.ini and CustomSettings.ini files. For the time being, I’ve got all my settings stored in CustomSettings.ini, but hope to get the database configuration working eventually. I also suspect that the authentication issues may disappear soon, as I’m migrating the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit from my own machine to the deployment server. Initially I’d had MDT installed on my local machine, as I wasn’t familiar with it, and wished to learn how it all functioned before setting it up on the server. Now that I know how it works and operates, I’ve got it installed on our WDS server. This will allow OHA to easily rebuild the image once I leave, whenever they wish.
I’ve also spoken with our vendors regarding deploying our custom image on the new machines once they arrive. They will be installing our custom image on whatever desktops/laptops we end up ordering, and delivering them to us beginning of August. Quite exciting really.
I love how hardware agnostic Vista is. It really makes developing a custom image much more enjoyable. Also having all the settings for the various stages in one XML file really helps things a lot. Unattend.xml is providing a wealth of features, and I’m really not sure I can exploit them all in the time allotted for this project. Hopefully we can make up for it in GP later on though.
We’re intending on deploying the majority of our applications via GP objects. This will allow greater freedom in customizing our user’s desktops. Using the Microsoft Office Customization Tool, I’ve created an unattended Office 2k7 installation. However, we’re going to have Office 2k7, Visio Viewer 2k7, Lotus Notes 6.5.6, and Windows Powershell as part of our main image. The rest of our applications will likely be via GP.
Anyway, that’s it for now. Apologies for the scatterbrainedness of the post. It’s late, and I’ve worked all day.

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Update on OHA Rollout Project