Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 has recently officially been released to manufacturing. The performance gains and new features of these new versions of Windows are very exciting. The sooner we install them on all of our organization’s computers the better. But there is one fly in the ointment. Installing hundreds or thousands of computers with new software can be a very big task. Manual installations of Windows and applications can take hours per machine, so many administrators have gone to image based deployments using an imaging solution such as Ghost.
With the Ghost application a technician creates a manual installation of Windows and applications on a computer. Then Sysprep is run on that computer to remove all security ids (SIDs) and other unique identifiers. Then the computer is shut down and rebooted with a Ghost boot disk that captures an image file of the entire hard drive. This image file, a ghost file, is then uploaded to a Ghost multicasting server for deployment. The drawback of the traditional ghost file is that it is a sector based file that cannot be changed in any way after it is created. If any updates need to be made a new computer must be created, updated with the changes and captured as a ghost file. Another issue is that the computer to which the image is applied must be nearly identical to the original computer from which the image was created. Image based deployments can be complicated because of the need to create and distribute many different image files.
Microsoft has solved many of these problems with the introduction of the Window Image File or WIM. A WIM is file-based image file rather than a sector-based image file such as the original ghost file. A WIM file can be mounted (accessed) and updated after it has been created using the ImageX utility. The WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit), a free download from Microsoft, includes some terrific tools that make deploying Windows much easier. Some of the tools and utilities included in the WAIK are ImageX, WindowsPE, OSCDIMG, Sysprep, and the USMT 3.0.
ImageX can create, modify, and apply WIM images. WIM files can be applied to a computer that has a different size hard drive than the computer on which the WIM file was created.
ImageX runs on WindowsPE, a lightweight command-line version of Windows that can boot from a flash drive, CD or even over the network.
OSCDIMG creates ISO files that can be booted from a CD of DVD. For example, CSCDIMG can create a bootable ISO of WindowsPE with ImageX.
A great feature of a WIM file is that a single WIM can contain multiple Windows 7 or Server 2008 versions. For example, one WIM could contain 3 versions of Windows 7 each with a different selection of application or languages. All files in common are stored once in the WIM file and highly compressed. During installation you select the version desired. ImageX can place WIMs on network shares or even burn them on DVDs, spanning the image across multiple DVDs if necessary.
WIM files created using the WAIK tools can also be deployed from WDS (Windows Deployment Services) running on Server 2008.
The latest version of the WAIK can be downloaded from:
Download it and start exploring a new generation of imaging tools today.
-Mark Menges
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