Deployment

What has really changed in Windows Server 2012?

A good advice to all systems administrators is to evaluate what benefits a new release of operation system will bring to their environment before taking a decision to upgrade. Upgrading for the sake of having the latest operating system is not the way forward unless the vendor is discontinuing its support. Although, Windows Server 2012 brings a number of new features system administrators need to focus on changes that will potentially have the greatest impact on their environment.

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An easy way to customize the Default User Profile in Windows 7

Back in the days, systems administrators used a convenient method of deploying standardized user profiles on workstations by creating a dummy user account, customize the profile and then use the Copy To feature from the System Properties User Profiles settings snap-in to copy the created profile over the default user profile. This worked well on Windows 2000, XP and Vista; however, the same procedure won’t work on Windows 7. 

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Windows Service Packs

You might have been advised to install Windows operating systems with specific service packs versions such as, Windows XP SP3 or Windows 7 SP1 and you might wonder what’s so important with all these service packs! A brief explanation of service packs will help you understand their specific purpose and what are the best practices when deploying service packs.

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Image deployment from a Network Share

This method of deployment is ideal for SMBs since its implementation is very straight forward and inexpensive as the main requirement is some storage space. This involves an installation of a reference computer (user/department configuration), creating a bootable client (Windows PE) and capturing the image onto a network share. Whenever, you need to install a new or reformatted computer system, you just need to push the image from the network share to that machine

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Creating a Windows PE boot disk

Windows PE enables you to boot a computer directly into memory (RAM Drive) and run various tools such as, deployment and recovery ones! To create a bootable Windows PE CD or DVD media and install the ImageX Windows WAIK tools perform the following steps:

Before proceeding further, I recommend you to Compress and Decompress your most popular archives with WinTar application!

1. Install Windows AIK tools on your computer
2. From ALL Programs\Windows AIK open the Deployment Tools Command Prompt
3. Create a local Windows PE build directory as follows:
   copype.cmd <architecture> <destination>
   where <architecture> can be x86 for Windows 32-bit environment, amd64 for 64-bit (including Intel 64-bit processors) and ia64 for Intel Itanium architecture
   while <destination> is the path to a local directory
   copype.cmd x86 c:\winpe_x86   –> for the 32bit env or copype.cmd amd64 c:\winpe_amd64   –> for the 64bit env
4. Read more…

Creating an answer file

An answer file gives you the control to perform an unattended installation, that is, the installation process is provided with the answers in a script file instead of having someone attending to it! You can for example, configure passwords, set default Internet Explorer settings, accepting a EULA, etc… The answer file should contain all the settings (answers) required during an installation.

Before proceeding further, I recommend you to Compress and Decompress your most popular archives with WinTar application!

To create an answer file, you use the Windows SIM utility found in Windows AIK by following these steps: Read more…

Problems with Windows SIM

Windows SIM fails to create a catalog for a 32-bit Windows image from a 64-bit version of Windows SIM. To workaround this issue, use the 32-bit version of Windows SIM to create 
catalogs for your Windows images.

Different binary versions of Windows SIM cannot create catalog files for some Windows images of different architecture types. MS recommends using the 32-bit version of Windows SIM to create catalog files because this version can create catalogs for all Windows image architecture types. The following list describes the Windows SIM architecture types and 
catalogs that can be created for each Windows image architecture type:- Read more…