Fortunately, the tools and services behind Windows deployments right out of the box have improved: indeed, it's possible to roll out desktops very easily with new deployment enhancements without resorting to more sophisticated and expensive management solutions. In this article, I'll take a look at four deployment improvements in Vista, and how they benefit you.
Modularization
One of the big engineering pushes Microsoft made during the development of Windows Vista was to make the operating system more modular -- meaning the components of the operating system are separate and somewhat interchangeable. While also improving the usability experience -- customers can select only the pieces they want to be installed without having to go for the entire OS -- the modularization also helps system administrators manage their deployments.
For example, drivers, service packs, updates and localization (languages) are all much easier to incorporate into Vista installations. It's possible to customize components both before and after installation to a degree that wasn't possible with previous versions of Windows. Patching, updating, and security vulnerability mitigation is easier because areas of the operating system are independent of others, meaning less breakage and less testing required to get an update out the door.
If you are an administrator for a larger, global network, you'll appreciate that Microsoft has made Windows Vista language-agnostic. Languages, including English, are treated as optional components from the required OS code, which allows you to add and remove them from installations and images very easy.
Windows Imaging Format
Part of the benefit of the modular improvements to Windows components is the introduction of the new Windows Imaging Format (WIM), a hardware-independent format that stores images of the operating system. The premise of WIM is make images many-to-one in nature, meaning multiple images can be contained within one WIM file.
Since Windows is so modular, 95 percent of the base operating system can be replicated among any number of images, so Microsoft itself can ship just one binary image for each processor architecture -- x86 and x64 -- to everyone in the channel. Additionally, the sizes of each of the image files are reduced using single-instance storage techniques and enhanced compression.
Perhaps the best usability improvement of the WIM format is the ability to edit the image offline using standard file management tools like Windows Explorer. You can add files and folder to an image. For example, instead of the painful driver addition process in Remote Installation Services (RIS), you can simply drop drivers directly into a WIM-based image and have them automatically present. Best of all, you don't need to create independent images for each edit you make -- the additions, modifications and deletions you make can co-exist without problem in one image, reducing management burden.
Windows PE
Windows Pre Environment, or Windows PE, is an execution environment designed to assist in installing and troubleshooting operating system installations. Rather than the old blue-background, text-based installation screen with previous versions of NT, Windows PE comes in graphical format and contains a full complement of tools to assist with getting Windows Vista installed on a drive.
The big win with Windows PE is that standard Windows network drivers work with it out of the box -- no hunting for special NDIS drivers only for network deployment use. Additionally, it has a built-in firewall to protect the operating system in its most vulnerable state, being partially installed, and the ability to insert drivers from any sort of removable media into the session.
You might recall the frustration of only being able to add a driver by hitting F6 at the right moment of Setup and then having the driver only on a floppy disk. Windows PE eliminates this annoyance.
Windows Deployment Services
Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is the next generation of Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003's RIS. It will release with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and is the only supported method of deploying Windows Vista over the network, so if you want to stream Vista images to desktops and notebooks over the net, you'll need to upgrade your RIS servers to that service pack level. WDS supports both x86 and x64 images as well.
Like RIS, WDS uses the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) capabilities of most modern BIOSes and network interface cards to load a session of Windows PE. Windows PE then presents a menu to the user consisting of all the appropriate image and configuration options available on the WDS machine. The user selects a target, and the image-in WIM format, of course-is laid onto the disk of the target machine.