How to deploy Vista remotely?

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.

Applies To: IT Managers
USP: WDS lets you do remote deployment of various Windows OS including Vista and Longhorn in one go
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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.

Adding OS images on WDS
On the WDS console, you will see the WDS server, ready to accept new OS images. Before this put your Vista distribution DVD in the WDS server's DVD drive. To add a new Vista image, expand the WDS server icon and right click on Install images. From the context menu, select Add Install Image. This will kick off a wizard to extract Windows Image Format (WIM) from the DVD.

WIM is a file-based imaging format that can store a large number of individual system images. The wizard will ask you to create a new image group. For this select 'Create New Image Group'. Next you will be asked for the image source files. For this browse the file at 'Vista DVD\SOURCES\INSTALL.WIM' and click next. Then the screen shows all the WIM files from the Vista DVD and gives you the list of all available WIM images. Here select the images that you want in your deployment server and click next. It will start processing the selected WIM files and then copies them to your WDS server.

Once all the images have been copied, you need to add a boot image to the WDS deployment server, so that the clients can be connected and booted from the WDS service. To do so open the WDS management console and expand the WDS server from left navigation pane. Then right click on boot images and select 'Add boot image' and choose the image from Vista DVD\SOURCES\ BOOT.WIM. Next you need to associate this file with WDS, so that a remote client can use this file while booting. For this right click on the WDS server from the console and select properties from the context menu. In the properties sheet select the 'Boot' tab and go to 'Default boot image (optional)' option. Select x86 architecture and add newly created boot image and then click OK. With this Vista image is ready to be served on the network for remote deployment. Finally, you need to restart WDS services.To do so right click WDS server from the management console, select all tasks and restart.

Client requirements
At the client's end, a machine that supports PXE LAN booting is needed. Configure the machine from the BIOS so that it can be booted from the network card directly. Once your machine gets the IP address from the DHCP running on WDS server, you will see the installation process getting started and after sometime you will see Windows Vista installation wizard on the remote client machine.

 Now you have deployed Vista completely without even using an installer DVD.