 Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer and I'll be instructor throughout this course. Now, I've been working in this high tech industry since the very early 80s. Back in the days before we talked about having windows when everything was command line, working in a variety of different mainframe environments, moving into Unix systems, eventually into the desktop and the servers that we see in our enterprise today. I've worked with a lot of different network operating systems such as the Novell environment and of course then along came what we see today with the Windows environment. I remember moving from the Novell to the Windows NT4 and from that point never turning back and continuing to go down the road of Windows from Windows NT through all the service packs up through Windows 2000, Server 2003 and of course now we're looking at Server 2008. Now over that time I've had a lot of opportunity to work with a lot of other network infrastructure so I became very savvy with the world of security, with the world of networking, with understanding IP and TCP and many of those underlying aspects as well as with the technologies that have been coming more and more prevalent like the virtualization and some of the really cool things that we can do through the use of our Windows systems. So our goal here is to be able to take all of that knowledge that I've worked with and to be able to put that into a way that works so that you understand all of the things that we're going to talk about throughout this course and of course give you a little more information than just technically what's in the book. The goal of this module is to talk about how to deploy Windows in the enterprise and which is exactly we're going to do. Now our focus will be on the Windows Server 2008 as far as the type of operating system that we want to be able to deploy but all of these technologies we're going to talk with will also work with your workstation types of deployments which would include if you wanted to go all the way back to Windows XP, the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Now we're going to look at a lot of different tools that come with the deployment options that are out there and a lot of different solutions so we're going to try to cover as many of those as we can and of course show you some examples of how they work. Specifically though we are going to talk about the WDS service which is the Windows deployment service which is really an upgrade to what we had in the 2003 server which was the RIS or the RIS server, the remote installation services so we're going to look at what we can do with that. We're also going to look at the targets for our deployment of being virtual machines and those virtual machines focusing in the Windows server virtualization or Hyper-V and of course we have to have an activation infrastructure as you know with the recent releases of Windows it's you need to have more than the product key and more than volume licensing. You still have to activate every version of Windows that you have just to verify that your actual product is being used by you and that somebody has an hijacked your keys or your information so all of that is going to be a part of what we cover here in the deploying of Windows throughout your enterprise. We're going to take a look at how to deploy Windows in the 2008 server environment. So what we'll do is we're going to basically take a look at the basics of what Windows deployment is and how Windows can be deployed. Now the deployment options have been around for decades and I know that sounds like a long time. Some of you might say well that doesn't seem long at all. You know really the technology is continuing to improve and to change but it has been really a long time in the world of IT. We're going to be taking a look at ways of deploying Windows basically to avoid using the sneaker net. Now the sneaker net for those of you who haven't heard that term simply means you walking from machine to machine to machine and doing a basic manual deployment of Windows. Now we could always do that and we call that an IFM and an install from media whether it was a USB drive or a DVD drive or whatever it was we were doing. We want to be able to find a way to add some automation in this to be able to touch 100 or 200 machines in the same amount of time that it would take you to deploy one or two on the manual way. So we're going to take a look at what that really means. What are the basics of the deployment and how we can deploy with a lot of the different technologies that are available to us. So let's take a look at the basics of deployment by starting off with the definition of what deployment is. Well deployment is just what it sounds like it's taking an image a ready to go release of your operating system and to be able to put it onto a target. Now a ready to go is a way of saying that it's not you know you putting in a CD or DVD and answering a bunch of questions and you know putting in the computer name and going through and waiting for the installation files and all that kind of stuff that we used to do when we did the IFM. This means that I have a set of files that I have to just copy it over to that hard drive and once I get a copy to that hard drive and I turn that thing on it says hey look I'm Windows and I'm ready to go. That's what we want we're going to see that installation of the of the Windows operating system and be able to do that to more than one destination at a time. Now how you do the deployment we have some solutions. You might be putting it onto a bare metal machine which is what most of us tend to do. By bare metal what we mean is whether there was an existing operating system there or not we're going to wipe it out and put the new one in its place. So you know call it as you would bare metal typically meant there was no previous operating system but we're not talking about mig or I shouldn't say migrating but upgrading an existing platform. Now that is a solution but that's the outside of the scope of where we're going to go here. We're talking about putting out the new solutions. Now having said that some of you may say well you know I've got a lot of user settings that they want to keep from the old version to whatever this new thing you're going to do which is very typical in the workstation deployment and you're going to see tools out there like the user state migration tool to be able to help you make that migration work for you without having to do an upgrade but being able to do that clean installation. Now as far as doing these types of deployments there are a lot of levels of automation well maybe not a lot but there's at least three that we're going to look at. That is of course the manual deployment that I've talked about but by the way the manual deployment doesn't mean that you're starting from scratch starting from scratch is the install from media. This means that you have the image and you're going to go and touch the machine and have it connect and get the image and basically boot up. It's still a much faster process than installing it from the original media but it is the slowest way we could do the automation. There's also a light touch and a zero touch and we'll look at both of those solutions. The difference between light touch and zero touch comes with how much if any user interaction needs to be made with each of the targets that I'm deploying Windows onto. Now another part of what we have to look at and at least I think you should look at it very briefly are the phases that we go through to actually get to the point where we're choosing an automate or a deployment option. That is the planning phase, the building phase, the deployment phase. It's one thing for me to sit here and tell you about all these great tools and say you know we have fun and deploy but you really want to look at your enterprise more in a way of a planning you know to say well what can be upgraded, what should be upgraded, can we take advantage of virtualization, can we consolidate some things that were on many different actual hardware platforms into a single server. Talking about the building phase, building the actual image and what do I want as a solution and then from that point now how do we deploy that? Should we roll it out in different areas? Should we upgrade this server first? You know all of these things I think are very important pieces of the puzzle to be able to really take advantage of Windows deployment and not cause you to basically have to say wow this didn't work or I just caused an outage and now I got to start this thing over again. So I think those are all very important parts that I wanted to add in to our discussion. So we're going to look at all of those albeit somewhat briefly but to make sure you have the knowledge to know that hey this is something we should go through. Now when we take a look at the planning phase now the planning phase has a lot of tools and by the way these are all Microsoft tools and for the most part most of them are free to download. There'll be a few in there like the system center configuration manager which would have some licensing but you can also utilize it for a while as a trial version to basically see if that's something that's going to work for you. Alright so what do we have? We have the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit. Now the Assessment and Planning Toolkit is going to gather information from you and from your network to be able to figure out basically does this hardware support perhaps this upgrade to Windows 2008 or to Windows 7? I mean is it ready for that type of change? Let's face it some hardware might have been great for Windows XP might have been a perfect Windows 2000 server but by today's standards it doesn't quite meet the needs we have for the more intense applications that are going to be running on some of these servers. So the tool then what we call the map is going to be able to help you in making that assessment and planning your deployments. You have the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit. Alright well that is I hope makes sense as far as a straightforward name it's going to say look at this application will what you're running right now on your 2003 server is that going to work on 2008 server? Is it going to work with these workstations? Is it going to be compatible? You have the Enterprise Learning Framework the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Now by the way the MDT is a tool that kind of has a stage in a couple of different levels both in planning and in the deployment and some other places they can use this tool and again it's about in this case planning making the ideas of as far as how I should get ready to deploy things what steps do I need to go through what other software do I need to be able to install as far as just the bare operating system and you know all of these tools can help us in that planning part of it. There's the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Packet or pack that helps you with the asset inventory and again very good as far as being able to know what you have available what is it going to meet the needs of what you have as far as the images you want to set out there and you have the System Center Configuration Manager which is a great tool an upgrade to what we used to call the SMS the Systems Management Server that can be able to help you not only in managing the connections to all the targets but also to be able to set up all those steps all the extras as far as what you want to push out to software. All of these are things that we can look at in the planning phase because the planning phase is just about that what do I want to deploy where do I want to deploy it will it support will the application run on this thing does it have the assets necessary for my needs or do I need to invest in some other hardware some other solutions and then finally being able to put it all together in such a way with the System Center Configuration Manager that when you're ready you can literally just push a button and all of your planning all those steps will be ready to go and to get the deployment. Now the building phase tools that's where the MDT deployment workbench might be useful now the building phases job is just what it sounds like creating the actual image. All right so one of the biggest tools that we used to use and still can use is the Windows Automated Installation Kit what they call the W-A-I-K. Now that kit comes with a lot of cool software for instance it comes with the Windows PE environment and we'll get a chance to talk about that but Windows PE is basically a miniature operating system that installs in the memory of the target machine. Now by installing in the memory what it does is make sure that it does not change the hard drive because the hard drive is either the target or the source of what I'm taking an image of and so Windows PE running in memory doesn't affect that image either a source or destination and allows me to be able to work with my choices of what I want to do. Now with the next tool is Image X which is another piece of that toolkit and we'll talk more about this toolkit a little bit later on but Image X would then be a tool that I could use to actually take the copy of what's on that hard drive to create it as my image my source for what I want to distribute or to use Image X to take the existing image and to put it into this new location as the target and also the user state migration tool is another great part of the building phase especially when you're working on a workstations when you're deciding that you're going to take all the workstations that are running Windows Vista and you want to make them all Windows 7 but you're going to do so maybe with a clean image installation but you want to keep your user settings then what you can do is prior to all this process as you go to all those existing workstations copy those user settings with this tool USMT and then after you've deployed the new Windows 7 you can put the settings back in with the same tool so again the building phase now I just threw out a bunch of tools remember the idea of the building phase is to come up with that perfect image that you want to use to be able to send it out to all the different targets now the sending out of the image that's the deployment phase so we built it in the previous phase now we're getting ready to send it out now there are a few things we can use number one the MDT deployment workbench now the workbench can help us in setting up all the tasks of what we want to install because remember an image might be more than just the base operating system we might also need to have office you know word or excel or those types of programs also install or some of the third party application or whatever it is we need to have done after the main operating systems have been put in there now we also have to have a way of being able to get that operating system out to everybody I have talked about the install for media because we could do that we could take an image that we made in the building phase burn it onto a DVD or load it into a USB stick pop that into the target we could make the installation that way or we could add a little more automation where we could just walk up to the target have it load to what we call a pixie environment the pre-execution environment and be able to get a copy of Windows PE and to communicate with a server called the WDS Windows deployment services and to be able to pull an image off the network or we can use something like system center configuration manager to make all that happen under automation where it can say all right you know I need this machine to boot up and I need it to run this Windows PE and they go pull off this automation this image file and install it automatically without me even touching the thing and following all the steps that we made in our deployment workbench and then of course adding if it's a workstation type of a deployment adding the information about the user state migration tool gathered from the operating system that was there before all right so again a lot of cool stuff we can do as far as getting ready to go from you know the old days of touching each machine and booting it up from DVD manually or I remember the days of even doing it from the we call them floppy disks you know the the five and a quarter and the three and a half and just plug in those things in there and having like 20 I remember I think for Windows 95 to be able to do an installation the hard way so this is a lot easier a lot faster and much more consistent anyway so lots of tools lots of phases that you should go through before you just decide to turn stuff on and start throwing out images now let's talk a little bit about some of the basics of the Windows deployment now some of the common components that you're going to be familiar with when it comes to a deployment solution will come from the Windows automated installation kit now I mentioned a couple of these already and now I'll get a chance to talk a little bit more about them but we had the Windows PE which is a like I said a little miniature operating system that loads up in the memory of the target for the purpose of being able to work with the hard drive I mean we're going to eventually you know boot this thing up to Windows PE because we either want to deploy an image to this target or this target may have been the source of our image that we want to use to deploy to the rest of the world in any event we don't want to be using the hard drive for either of those purposes because it's either the target or the source so we have to run in the RAM environment now the image X is a tool that we would then use to be able to do one of those two things gather the information from the hard drive to make this the source of my image or to take an existing image whether a network located or on a WDS server or just even off of a USB drive that I stuck into this PC and install that image now there's also the windows system image manager the windows sim now sim is an important piece of this puzzle because part of automation means I don't want to be involved in answering questions but questions do have to be answered what's the name of the computer going to be what's the initial password what domain is it a part of automatically what kind of network information should it have static IP DHCP server you know all of these are questions that are needed by windows just to be able to operate so the windows system image manager can help us by helping answer those questions and creating an answer file so that when you do deploy the image and this thing boots up it can just go right from that file and answer its own questions again leaving you out of the mix as far as having to actually interact with the image deployment and another piece of this puzzle we need is called sys prep sys prep has been around for a very long time at least since windows 2000 as I last our first remember hearing about it and sys prep short for system preparation was designed to remove the pertinent information that makes every single workstation and server unique or uniquely identified within your network it's a tool that we use to basically create an what we call an amnesiac out of windows so it doesn't know who it is until it gets that answer file that way we don't cause any duplication of identities when we start deploying these images and again we'll look at each of these especially the windows PE and sys prep in a little more detail well let's take a little bit more of a look at windows PE which stands for the pre installation environment now it is a bootable version of windows but it does not need to be installed on the hard drive now I know that sounds odd but think about we did this a many times we used to in the old days boot up a system to DOS you know we had a little floppy drive we plugged it into the a drive turned the machine on and it booted up to a DOS disk and then we could format the drive and do all sorts of cool stuff even if we wanted to in some of the old days be able to have enough information on that bootable DOS to be able to talk to the network and pull down an image I mean we we had those technologies not as graceful as they are today or as flexible as we have them today but we had those types of options before but that doesn't mean that it's a bad idea so this is a bootable version of windows it's not on the hard drive as I said it's stored in the memory and and from there we have an operating system that lets us interact with that with that target we can then say okay look now I want to do something I want to use the dvd drive to maybe burn an image to or take an image and install it or usb drive or connect to the network from some location it allows me to be able to basically say we're doing something with imaging technology now once you're booted up to the windows pe it's at that point that you can take an image as I said or install an image but you do need some other tools to do that windows pe is kind of the platform that you use to be able to work with the other tools a part of the waik as I said before one of those tools is the image x now again as part of the waik it is a command line tool and it allows us to capture or to modify or to apply a whim images all right now whim we'll talk about the whim files in just a bit but those are windows image files so the im for image what it does is I guess pretty straightforward to capture an image says let's take a look at this hard drive this operating system that's on here not the windows pe that's in memory but what's on the actual hard drive and let's take a copy of that and save that copy somewhere in this whim image format I'm going to talk a little bit more about that whim image format in just a bit so that when I talk about modifying these it'll make more sense hopefully in a few more pages but anyway that's one option now applying a whim image that means that somewhere else we had what I like to call the pristine environment pristine environment says I did the perfect setup of windows windows 7 windows 2008 server I mean it's it's perfect no errors everything boots up just fine and now I'm going to copy it so I can deploy that thing out to a virtualization solution or out to another hardware platform so I can have windows 2008 or windows 7 or whatever I want to do so I can then you know use this tool to make that copy off that perfect environment the modify now this is interesting that means that I may have let's say captured an image this perfect image and I said you know I need to add something to it you know you know whatever I need to modify I want to be able to alter this file without having to rebuild windows I don't want to rebuild it for one little change when I can just use this command line tool to do what they call mounting the whim file and basically making the changes in the whim file saving those changes and then being able to deploy whatever whatever it was that I just modified and we'll see hopefully some examples at least in my conversation with you about how all that process can work together okay again image x is a tool it's a command line tool now does it have to run from windows pe answers no but most often it's more successful for us to boot up to the windows pe and then run image x remember image x is not a gooey it is a command line tool another part of that windows installation kit the waik is the windows sim now remember the idea was is that it helps us create an unintended answer file basically I guess we call them the setup answer files now we've always had the opportunity at least from windows 2000 even with windows nt I remember having some answer files before but they were text files and in fact they were not very graceful text files a lot of the times we had to know the exact name of the category that we were about to set up and we will put the name of the category like networking in inside of these big square brackets in our word pad or notepad and then we had to you know basically know the variable name equals and then put in the name of the answer you know so if you knew the name of the domain you'd say domain equals and then the quotes around the domain and and you had to you had to use the variables you had to spell them exactly the way that they were expected to be used you know it was I mean it was don't get me wrong it was better than nothing it was better than having to sit there and answer those questions one at a time because in those days when we installed windows nt or windows 2000 it wasn't turn it on boot it up copy the files over you know answer some questions on one page and walk away you couldn't do that it would ask you some questions do some work ask some questions do some work so you had to basically devote a few hours of your life sitting there waiting for those questions to come up at least with 2008 server they made the installation now when going for media where you do answer all the questions up front and then you can walk away and come back but even still we want to not have to be there we basically want to push these images out have them get these answer files and be able to do their own work and just next time we see it it's up and running all right so a couple of things number one these new files are based in xml now some of you are saying okay you just told me about how awful those text files work because you had to know how everything was built and you're saying xml and they say have you ever seen xml and i say sure i understand that it has to be a very well formed language that it does not look nice without any type of style sheet to improve its appearance that it basically looks a bit complicated once you start to get the understanding of xml i don't think it's that hard to read get away with a lot of copy and paste but we don't have to manually type it we're going to have windows sim create the xml file for us so all we have to do is help fill in some blanks so in that essence this is a lot easier than what i was saying we had to do the text files now granted there was a setup manager in the old days that helped us with the answer files but setup manager well it was a bit different because you know when we use setup manager it said well what are you installing windows 2000 uh you know uh were you doing the professional the workstation what are you what are you putting in there and based on those uh what we said it would have some generic questions that it would ask us well in the windows sim we actually have a GUI this program that can read the catalog files from the image and from those catalog files create a custom answer file for each specific image that we create and through those catalogs you can ask us basically all the questions we need uh on this image and knowing that if let's say i got two images both for server 2008 one's got is uh as a part of the image and the other has uh hyper v as a solution uh they have different uh questions that might need to be answered for the setup and sim can read these uh these types of uh things uh the catalogs and be able to help create that custom answer file for that particular image so i don't have to make xml i now have a GUI that can work with the actual image and not just the uh you know generic uh type of installation that allows me to be able to create that image or the answer file for that image now another tool that we have is sys prep now sys prep's job uh is to help us in deploying windows images and here's how it helps uh what it does is it uh works with removing the specific identifiers what we call the security identifiers or identifying features out of the image prior to our deployment of the image the here's here's what you think about what happens if i have the uh an image i wanted to deploy well i had to make that device in that perfect pristine environment to be able to take an image copy of it that meant i had to set up a windows 7 or i had to set up a 2008 server i had to go through and manually answer the questions make sure everything was just as i wanted it to be and uh and then make that image from it but the problem is is that when i created that uh perfect environment i had to give it a hostname i had well our computer name i had to tell if it was a work group or part of a domain i had to uh you know and if it was a part of a domain it had to generate a connection to the domain controller get a security identifier and all that sort of stuff that it had to go through to be able to fully set up because without it i didn't have that perfect environment but now the problem is is i cannot take a copy of this uh this new deployment that i made as an image and then send it out around my enterprise because every destination would have the same security identifier same hostname same ip address i mean everything would be uh duplicated to the point that it would cause confusion on the network contention and services wouldn't start and there would be a tough time even being able to do things like name resolution so sysprep says let's wipe out all of that information so that when i do deploy it's going to look as though it was the first time windows has ever run now if any of you have ever bought a computer for home a laptop whatever it is and you know you're all excited you take it out of the box you pop that thing open it says first time windows has ever run okay it's not it was installed on the machine uh well it was installed somewhere uh and an image was made of it and it was put onto your laptop or onto your workstation so when you opened it up put it together out of the box uh powered the thing on it uh said hey this is the first time windows has ever run okay well again not quite true it has what i call the amnesia sysprep uh told it to forget everything it knew about itself so now when you first boot it up it's going to ask you what's my hostname am i part of a domain and all of these different types of questions so that it can start up but it's a very fast startup because uh all the work of installing the operating system was already done all you had to do is get through those other little bits of answers and by the way sim can help you create the answer file to answer those sysprep erased areas when you do the deployment of your new image all right so we talked a little bit about the whim the windows imaging format or the windows image files so i've heard it uh describe both ways but i suppose this is a better acronym windows imaging format it is a file based not sector based image and so let me describe what's going on so here you see this whim a set of files versus the actual hard drive that we actually pulled the image from now i'm going to try to draw a little bit of an inside view of what's happening inside the hard drive if you remember hard drive is divided into lots of these little pie shaped pieces and uh the go along with all these little rings and they call them sectors and so you know we have these little sectors and these little sectors are able to store all these ones and zeros all the way across that's what it does is a hard drive it stores ones and zeros and all that sort of stuff and we take that sector and and we have a bunch of them we put together to call basically a cluster of information and so we have all these little sectors and i didn't put quite enough on there but eventually it becomes what we call the smallest storage area that windows can access and here's the idea it can store i think by the time we get it all done a thousand and twenty four bytes or one k per each of these little clusters and i've got a file now and my file is a notepad file and all we typed was hello world on my notepad file so it's a 11 bytes total in size i think if i counted that up and so we store it and that little file takes up this much room right there there's my 11 bytes right there that i just used or not bits bytes and and now the rest of this is what we call slack space this is probably more than you want to know about hard drives slack space because it can't be used for anything it's uh it once uh once your windows uh ntfs system has said this sector has a file even though it's only 11 bytes in size if you actually were to right click that file in in your windows explorer and look at the properties it would tell you what its size on disk is because again windows you know has a uh a smallest amount of storage that it will work with so it's going to tell you it's using up a lot of room even though it's not why is this important well here's why it's important um if this was the old sector based technology when i created an image i would take all of this and copy it into my image that's uh you know if i look at the math that's um a thousand and thirteen bytes i don't need and so instead uh whim would just take that little piece of that sector that i need off of all of the hard drive and give me a much smaller storage i mean really i wouldn't need as much storage but it gives me just truly the files that are located on the hard drive rather than the sector by sector based image or copying of a hard drive and and that makes us a much more lightweight type of of setup as far as the image makes it a much smaller image now uh having gone through all of that uh here's another good part about it is because it is a file based i can now use something like image x as i said before to go and open this up as a file because it is just a file i don't have to worry about oh if i alter the file that's going to change right if i did some alteration it's going to change how that cluster was uh was being used and then i might wipe out the integrity of the disk and blah blah blah all those uh issues we had they're not there now because i'm just simply editing a file if i make the file bigger or smaller it doesn't matter it's just a file uh because eventually we're going to take this and deploy these files as our image to the new target hard drive so that was one of the cool things i said that image x can do it can help us uh mount and then update or or edit these files um to before we deploy them okay because it's a file these have ntfs assuming you're storing it on an ntfs drive permissions so that i don't have to worry about just any old user being able to get their hands on these files and potentially gathering things like passwords and uh sensitive information uh that are on there and also when i now go to deploy this to a new hard drive well here's a new hard drive and this hard drive may already have existing data being stored on the hard drive in the old days a sector by sector image i would take this old hard drive image sector by sector starting basically at sector zero through uh whatever the end of that image is and i would rewrite over all that data to start at sector zero to put this new information on and i would be a very destructive process now let me make a new hard drive because these are files if there's already existing data i have some choices by the way i could still format the drive before i installed these things if that's what you want to do but because they're files i'm just going to add them to the hard drive and yes you can make a whim bootable so you can boot up to that new operating system so it's also uh ability to be non destructive in its deployment as well so uh again that's kind of a great idea to uh make it easy for storing easy to gather easy to change easy to deploy and non destructive and still able to be secured as file accesses would be by anti fs permissions that you put on makes it a great idea great technology for the use of imaging in the windows environment now let's take a closer look at some of the benefits of having these windows image files and um it's basically saying you know a closer look at whim number one it's a file because it's a file information we got off that the source hard drive we did not copy uh the type of hardware that it was on when we did the installation in other words these files are just files they are not dependent on what we call the hell or the hardware abstraction layer now the hardware abstraction layer the reason that might be an issue is because uh you know we need drivers for windows to be able to communicate with much of the hardware but if the platform that we are deploying windows whatever into is compatible with that version of windows we shouldn't have any issues as far as uh being able to make that deployment in other words if i have a machine that is windows 7 ready and i have an image of windows 7 that means that windows 7 should natively be supporting that hardware abstraction so i don't have to worry about uh the hardware capabilities other than making sure i have the minimum processor speed needed and the minimum amount of memory and all that sort of stuff fact it's even easier in a virtualized environment because uh all i have to do is make sure that i have those files and through the virtualization and the virtualized connectors they use for the hardware going through that layer of hyper v well we'll talk about that later uh makes it even easier okay they can still be customized with scripts or answer files because they are images they can be as i said modified offline because they are simply files that can be read from written to modified whatever you want to look at it from uh saved and and continue to be used now another great benefit of these files is that they can share common files in other words i may it may very well be that i have many different types of images so or many different options i want to deploy but they perhaps have the same common core settings of windows that would be a common file system so there's no reason for me to have to say oh well i've got to take this part of windows and copy it over here because i need it with these other options now i don't need to do that they can just both reference the same common file kind of that same modularity that uh they used in the approach of designing windows i mean one of the reasons they created those dll files is so they can have code that was in common to many different applications without having to rewrite the same thing over and over again of course i told you they were bootable we can boot up from that disk image that's stored in a whim file and it's non-destructive it doesn't erase any of the existing data on your drives now when we take a look at ways to deploy windows we talked about some levels of automation and so that's kind of what i was trying to show us here is that as your automation gets higher and higher how many machines can i deploy in the same amount of time you know there's i guess a number of ways we could put it in there but i thought all right well let's look at the manual basic installation now this is assuming you're still doing a windows image file that you're doing whim and still not doing an install for media because if i install for media that'd be like way down here towards nothing you know no progress but that's just taking that whim file from one machine to another putting it in there answering the questions and then walking over to the next machine and putting that one in there as well so you know over here as best as i can we'd have that walking person walking from machine to machine i guess it looks a little more like a hieroglyphic now anyway that's one option we have now if we go up to the light touch deployment i still need a user over here the user's job is to be able to answer the questions that would probably be there after having done sys prep remember i said sys prep's job is to erase the unique information and so they'd have to be there to answer some of those basic questions but the reason that is called light touch is that i'm not answering all the questions about a windows deployment like i might have to do all the way back here with a manual or basic a test especially if doing it from media now one of the nice things is with this setup is you know as the user that's setting this up i can you know turn on several pcs i can have you know a bunch of these pcs all get these images from the network while i'm sitting in that one location or however i want to set it up and then i just have to touch each one to answer the basic questions in other words i could download all the images to every single machine and then just have to spend a few minutes with each one so that gives me a little higher right automation along this graph which means that i have less work to do with each machine so i should be able to get more of these deployed in the same amount of time the zero touch means that all of the tasks post and pre-installation tasks all of the answer files are ready to go everything is pretty much been pre-staged maybe the the better term pre-staged so all i have to do now is have some sort of software or something like the system center configuration manager push the images out to the machines and these machines will all just boot up on themselves i'm not even going to draw a user account there because i really don't have to interact with these machines maybe any more than just to make sure that they're actually plugged in and turned on which means that it's at a high level of automation going down here to the level of automation and i can get that much more done in fact a lot of these can be done while i'm at home relaxing come in the next morning look at the log to see if there were any problems with any of the installations so lots of capabilities now all of these solutions can be done with the existing microsoft solutions that are available to us we can use wds for both of these which is part of the windows server 2008 it's just a roll that we'll talk about a little bit later that you can install to set this up and again a few other pieces of us software you know software to make the images software to create the answer files those types of things all available for us to be able to set up any level of deployment or automation for the deployment and it should be a matter of you're having gone through the planning phase to determine what is the best way for you to be able to deploy windows now as we talk about these levels of automation the first one i mentioned was manual deployment now i try to make it sound pretty ugly and it's really not ugly it works very well works almost every single time you boot from a dvd usb drive is very popular today network shares as well works out just fine for us and you can still have answer files made available so that once you get the image set up that you could you know tell it you know do this set up use this answer file and then kind of walk away from it now in this process if you boot from the dvd we'll start off with you would still need to have some way of booting up to be able to get to the dvd in other words powering on the system for the most part when you do this manual deployment from a dvd drive if the bios is already set to boot from this dvd cd rom drive first before the hard drive then you should see a little message that you know basically says press any key to boot from the dvd you hit that any key and then it just goes through but you have to answer all those questions individually if you wanted to use an answer file you could still do this from a dvd but you have to be booted up to another operating system so you can run the setup with the appropriate switches to say and also use this answer file you could do that from the windows pe environment as well a network share again i have to have something on that on that target that i'm going to put the image onto to let me boot up to be able to get that network share i could by the way still just boot up to my regular old windows and try to make that network share and see if i'm doing an upgrade versus a clean install that is a possibility or again booting to windows pe and making the network connection as well in those events the answer files are usually in the same location but that's still a lot of work and you got to touch each one individually to be able to get this deployment out there now you could manually deploy as well from the wds server now the wds server we'll talk about in just a little more detail as we go on but that's the same as a network share because it is a network device now for the windows deployment services you do have to have some underlying technologies made available to you you need to have active directory made available to you a dhcp server a dns server and the file system on the wds server must be in the ntfs format for the security portions of as far as the authorization is concerned so let me see if i can kind of quickly point out some of the underlying what i need so here's my target machine and my target machine is the one that wants the new image on there and let's add in this other empty space on my ethernet network the wds server all right so the target machine now remember we're talking about a manual deployment here as opposed to some of the levels of automation you're going to see something very similar to this setup where we'll talk even more about why i need these underlying technologies to make wds services available to me but for the most part here's some of the basics number one dns you know if i'm doing a network boot i need the dns server to be able to tell me what is the ip address of my wds server without the ip address i'm not going to get very far so that means i need to have the dns server tell me hey there's a wds server that's where your image is located i as a target need my own ip address so that's why i need a dhcp server to be able to help me assign that own ip address and when i finally then use that information to make the connection and i'm asking for an image well imagine if you would that i was perhaps a a bit of a rogue agent let's put another connection on our ethernet segment and we'll put ken the hacker here trying to make him look a little more evil here and i decided i'm going to plug in my machine and get a free licensed version of 2008 server to save myself a lot of money and i use your network and i connect to the wds server to get that windows 2008 and before it sends it to me it says hey who are you authenticate yourself i need to know that you even have permission you or the computer that you're using to get that image and if you can't authenticate then boom i'm not giving you anything so that's why the active directory as well to help me with the authentication process it's it all works together to give us a more secure and a more dynamic setup and delivery of image technologies with wds all right so now that was a lot of outside the topic when we said you know hey we're talking about manual deployment but wds is a manual deployment option i just thought it would be kind of good to at least introduce now some of these underlying technologies that are needed for you to be able to have a wds server and we'll certainly talk about it in more detail now some of the other deployment options that we talked about were things like the light and zero touch deployment now uh the service center configuration manager 2007 can support many tasks to make the light touch and zero touch installations work for you now what it can do is it can gather information remember the idea of the security or the configuration manager is it connects to these machines and can deploy agents now i don't want to get into the ins and outs of the configuration manager but it can deploy software agents onto these devices to be able to gather information about the hardware inventory that you can use to create reports to determine if the potential target is even a good candidate but it also then with that agent is capable between the communications between the agent install on the target and the configuration manager able to do things like the distribution of the operating system to provide the necessary authorizations both in retrieving the information from the wds server and on the destination location as well it can initiate the installation of software packages and many other features that make it possible for you to set up and schedule these deployments now along with that you still need the the the microsoft deployment toolkit the mdt for the the needs of setting up the individual tasks that you want to have run the wds server which as i already talked about is the location or storage of the image plus the agent to authenticate whether or not you have the right to get that image and many other things that i need and if we're saving the user settings especially useful in going from one workstation type like vista to seven we can use the usmt as well now the difference between all of this of course light and zero touch is in the zero touch i don't need to be there to answer any questions that's where i might have the windows sim having created my answer file so that that can be utilized to fill in the the gaps of what's missing after i deploy the software and the thing boots up gets all the answers off the answer file and then by the time it's done it's done i just need to look at the logs and make sure there were no errors