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I have been googling around all day trying to figure out what the best approach to this is, or if there even is one.

Goal - Quickly image a PC from our Network.

Current Setup - Currently, we have disk duplicators that we plug a bunch of hard drives into and duplicate a source drive to multiple target drives.

So, we have our customers image on a hard drive and grab whichever hard drive we need to duplicate.

Issues - Here are some of the issues that I am trying to overcome, but having trouble finding the answers

  • Since we have multiple disk images that we need to image onto PC's, I was thinking since we have a server that we are decommissioning I would like to re-purpose it to store all of our customer disk images and then hook into the network and pull the image from the server onto the PC. Is this possible? what would be the proper method to go about doing this? Can I do this with MDT?

  • If the above will not work, another option would be having a fixed station that I can swap the hard drive out of and then MDT through the network to another terminal. What is a good resource for instructing me to do this?

Adjit
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  • I haven't used MDT but Windows Deployment Services (which I believe is a component of MDT) should be able to do this. MDT is fairly complex, WDS is fairly simple. – joeqwerty Oct 02 '15 at 21:34
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    What you want to do is definitely possible, but there are _several_ concepts you need to master before you will be able to accomplish this. The first is using PXE to boot from a network location. – Joel Coel Oct 02 '15 at 22:08
  • If you just want to drop images onto a hard disk there's a ton of options ranging from the free Clonezilla to many commercial products - most any of them would do the job nicely. If however you actually want to build the system each time automatically (i.e. install Windows, install the applications, configure settings, etc.) MDT is probably your best option. MDT is definitely a good choice if it's easier to keep licensing straight by freshly installing software rather than using a duplicated image (dunno what you're putting on your images). – Brandon Xavier Oct 03 '15 at 03:09
  • @BrandonXavier Well, so the PC will already have windows on it, but what our customers will do is image a hard drive configured the way they need their software set up, and then we would basically just clone it to a hard drive. – Adjit Oct 04 '15 at 05:43
  • I know Serverfault frowns up product recommendations, but in this case I'd play around with Clonezilla first, It probably does everything you need. But if not, it'd be a great baseline for for investigating other solutions. – Brandon Xavier Oct 04 '15 at 06:38
  • Can you clarify what type of imaging operation your running? Deployment, image capture, configuration, etc...? – Elliot Huffman Oct 13 '15 at 14:47
  • @ElliotLabs We have customers that make their own software for certain PC's that they deploy in the field. As their distributor we will set up the hardware, by imaging the hard drives, so that they get the PC and its good to go, all they need to do is plug it in. As of now we are using hard drive duplicators. Imaging from the network isn't necessarily a must... Another option I was thinking about was imaging from a PC. **ie** have a workstation PC that I plug the customers PC into and image the hard drive on the customers PC. Just unsure how to go about all of this – Adjit Oct 13 '15 at 14:54
  • @Adjit Are you deploying an OS or just applications? – Elliot Huffman Oct 13 '15 at 14:59
  • @ElliotLabs it isn't their own OS. The terminals are running off of Windows 7, but the software application is set up a specific way on the hard drives. I am unsure of how they set it up, but it is set to their specifications. I can try and get an ISO from them, but still not sure what good that would do me – Adjit Oct 13 '15 at 15:03
  • @Adjit So it sounds to me that you have to deploy the entire OS just because of the fact that you can't deploy the Application (because of the before stated reasons). So just to double check, you need to deploy a Custom OS image? (custom means configured in this case) – Elliot Huffman Oct 13 '15 at 15:16

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MDT has been designed for advanced remote deployment without the need to make custom WIM images.

If you have an OS setup that your duplicating then you can image capture the HDD/SDD and deploy that image with WDS. WDS is for network image deployment via PXE (with optional domain joining upon completion).

Image Capture.bat (if you have already configured the installed OS)

imagex /capture X:\path\to\Stuff\to\image Y:\Path\to\output\image\file.wim "image name" "description of image"

  • Where X:\path\to... is the location of the files you want to capture to a WIM file. This can be the root of a drive (H:\ for example) to image capture the entire drive.
  • Y:\Path\to... is where the WIM file will appear.
  • "Image name" is the name of the image once it is in the WIM file.
  • "description of image" is text appended to an image for ease of identification (WIM files can have more than one image in them)

Check out imagex /capture /? for more customization of your image (E.G. compression)

Deploying captured image with WDS:

Simply import the captured image into WDS as an install image to be able to deploy it (this assumes you have a boot image and are familiar with how to deploy with WDS.)

TL;DR:

MDT is most likely not in your best interest as you can't deploy the application separately from the OS.

Elliot Huffman
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  • Awesome, thanks. I will have to read up on WDS in that case. I know of it, I am just unfamiliar with how to use it. Do you know of any good resources for learning WDS? – Adjit Oct 13 '15 at 16:47
  • It has a simple and self explanatory GUI. You pretty much don't have to learn about WDS,. I would recommend learning about WIM images though as that would help tremendously in imaging setups. – Elliot Huffman Oct 13 '15 at 16:50
  • What would you use for image capturing? I was reading the ImageX docs, and it seems Windows SIM is the answer. Does that seem correct? – Adjit Oct 13 '15 at 17:02
  • I would personally recommend `DISM` or `imagex` I use imagex as it was the original tool but dism has gotten much much better and for people new to this field I would recommend `DISM` – Elliot Huffman Oct 13 '15 at 17:06
  • Ok thanks. I didn't know ImageX would take care of that. I was looking at it's dependencies and it seemed as if it needed Windows SIM for my application – Adjit Oct 13 '15 at 17:12
  • @adjit I am glad that I could help! – Elliot Huffman Oct 13 '15 at 17:14