Corey Hynes, president of Florida-based consultancy HynesITe, told a large gathering of IT professionals at this year's Tech.Ed conference in Sydney on Wednesday that Windows Vista has a new architecture more suitable for enterprise deployments.

Hynes acknowledged a lot of desktop administrators have "gone through the pain" of managing text files and configuring Windows XP and 2000 desktops, but Vista is "quite a bit different" for large deployments, because Microsoft has reengineered everything it could.

"Vista is a major change in the way the operating system is packaged and installed; it's one 2.5GB file called Install.wim," Hynes said. "That is Vista fully installed and it comes with new tools and technologies based on XML."

Hynes said there was not a lot of knowledge on how to deploy operating system images within large enterprises, but with tools like Business Desktop Deployment (BDD), now it's "almost a product" with "lite" and zero-touch options.

"Most deployments are done with tools like Ghost, which take an image of the disk, whereas a wim file is a file-based image of the disk," Hynes said. "It is a copy of every file on the partition so it is a nondestructive deployment."