Imagex and Sysprep

[Gaprofitt]

Hi All,

Maybe you guys can clear up some confusion for me. In the past I have used sysprep to create

images and used RIS to deploy them via PXE boot. I understand we now have a new tool called imagex, my

understanding is you sysprep the machine, boot into WinPE and the run imagex to capture the image. What

are the advantages of doing this versus the way I have been doing it? By the way we are deploying XP and

not vista.

Greg A. Profitt

[dem3tre]

What are the advantages of doing this versus the way I have been doing it?

If your RIS box is running Windows Server 2003 then you can take advantage of the new Windows Deployment Services (WDS) which is the upgrade to RIS needed for it to be able to deploy WIM images and PXE boot WinPE 2.0.

The advantage you gain is a fully networked preinstall environment, ala WinPE 2.0, and an image format with much better compression ratios and supportability/provision. Through the single instancing feature of the WIM format you could have a single image with 2 completely different windows xp builds and not have to worry about storing duplicate files (imagex basically does the same thing the RIS groveler service does). Also, you can provision a WIM image offline which means you can mount it to a folder and make changes to it without having to image a box and resnap as you would with RISREP.

Edit: Forgot to mention that once you have your WIM image your options for deploying it are much greater than with RIS. With WIM you could use WDS/RIS, a simple network share, a bootable CD/DVD, etc.

All in all Microsoft did a great job with version 1.0 of WDS and imagex.

Edited May 25, 2007 by dem3tre