Remote Installation Service (RIS) is available on all Windows 2000/2003 servers and helps to deploy all Windows OSs across workstations in an enterprise. But the service doesn't support Windows Vista and the upcoming Longhorn. To overcome this, Microsoft has come out with a new service called 'Windows Deployment Service' (WDS) to replace RIS.

Pre-requisites for WDS
To deploy the service, you require a Windows 2003 SP1 server with RIS and DHCP server running. You also require Window Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which is a 900 MB DVD image file that you have to burn on a DVD. You can even mount this image as a DVD on your Windows machine using a virtual CD/DVD demon tool.

Updating RIS to WDS
The WAIK DVD will auto-run when you put it on the deployment server and open an interface for you. On the left end of the welcome screen you will see seven options. Select the Windows Deployment Server option. This leads you to a folder with four files: two doc files and two RIS update patches for AMD and x86 architectures. Choose the relevant patch. To start the update process, double click the RIS update file and proceed with the wizard till you finish the entire process. Once you are done, you will be asked to restart the machine.

Configuring WDS
After rebooting, you will notice that your RIS has changed to WDS. Now go to Start>All programs>Administrative Tools and click on WDS. This will open a Microsoft Management Console screen, showing a list of available WDS servers on the left navigation pane. Select the server object from the left pane and right click on it. From the context menu select 'Configure Server'. This will kick off the WDS configuration wizard. In the first screen you will be asked to specify the remote installation folder location. Just keep in mind that the location you give is on a separate NTFS formatted drive other than C drive. Next you will be asked to configure DHCP options, select both the options-'Do not listen on port 67' and 'Configure DHCP option 60 to PXEClient'. In the next screen configure how the WDS server should respond to known or unknown clients. Generally in RIS you need to set 'respond to unknown clients', otherwise you can't deploy an OS image. But with WDS there is an option to notify system administrators when an unknown client attempts to connect, and then serve that client once the approval has been given from the administrator. With this the WDS configuration part is complete. Now add Vista images to the WDS server.