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Remote or Unattended Installation Solutions?
HaloZero asks: "I work for a medium-sized company (350+ users), and am charged with new builds and deployments for a mix of aged and new desktops, and a smattering of similar laptops. The hardware is certainly not uniform across the entire infrastructure. Our current deployment 'system' (Ghost/Sysprep, Acronis/NewSID) is somewhat of a kludge -- as my mentor would say -- and I've been looking into alternative, cleaner methods. We're burgeoning on an Active Directory domain, so RIS has been the hot topic on my desk as of late. Does anyone have any experience with RIS? Is there anything that isn't very well documented that I should watch out for? We're considering other unattended install solutions, such as nLite, and a composite of Bart's PE Builder-type setups. Any other suggestions out there?"
Or just use Etherboot to create boot floppies with a PXE stack for the NICs that don't support it.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
I work for a mid-size company (~1500 desktops at 40+ remote sites), and I've been working on exactly the same problem for the last 2 weeks. Our solution until now has been buiding a new 'base' system and using PowerQuest V2i to take a disk image. This works OK, except for the fact that we had to build a new image from scratch every time slightly new hardware came out, and since our current hardware list is HUGE (we're slowly phasing out old hardware with new standardized stuff), it was impossible to build an image for every permutation.
Over the last 2 weeks or so I've been building up an automated deployment suite -- I started first by figuring out how to do unattended installs of all our client software (this is different for each piece of software you'll deploy, so RTFM). Microsoft generally provides *great* tools for deployment (and usually anything using the Windows Installer is easy to customize), everything else is a mixed bag. Once I had applications installing properly in unattended mode, I turned my sights to the operating system.
I explored a couple of options, like Sysprep/Image. The sysprep method worked, but there were a couple things that weren't ideal in our environment (for one, we would have had to ship 3 CDs to each of our branches -- one for the V2i restore utility itself, then 2 or 3 for the spanned disk image. Not all our machines have DVD-ROMs yet, nor do they all have local servers). The disc duplication efforts alone were a time sink.
What I ended up doing was using nLite (http://www.nliteos.com) to customize the install process, including the unattended settings. I RARed up the unattended applications, and included the RAR file, a commandline UnRAR utility, and miscellaneous filesystem stuff in the $OEM$ folder on the Windows disc. Then I put some entries in RunOnceEx which automatically UnRARed the archive, then installs each application in turn.
The total install process involves two steps of user interaction -- the first is to select what partition to install Windows to during the text-based portion of the install, and again during the setup process to ask for a machine name (we use a structured machine naming convention). The machine is joined to the domain automatically, apps are set up automatically, and the machine reboots to its 'final' state automatically. About 20-30 minutes after popping in the disc, you have a complete, reimaged system, and you only need to pay attention to it for about 30 seconds.
After stripping the OS CD down with nLite, and RARing up our customized apps, my disc came out at a nice 664MB... small enough to fit on one CD, with room left over for future service packs, patches, and additional drivers.
Now all we have to do is add new drivers and roll in new service packs and patches as needed, which is a breeze with the nLite wizard. We plan a new 'release' of the disc every 2-3 months, with incremental OS and application patches pushed out as needed.
Best of luck; it takes a little while to really figure out the best approach, but once you do it's quite easy to maintain, and is definitely a huge time saver.
I also use Unattended. For me, at least, one huge advantage is that it doesn't require a Windows server.
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