> 1. What are the most significant new capabilities in GSS 2.0 with regards to Vista?
That's a hard question; as proud as we are of the work we have done, "most significant" is a really hard thing to judge because so many people use GSS in such radically different ways, and in addition we developers don't necessarily have the right perspective on how valuable the features we worked on are. We made hundreds and hundreds of changes, some of which aren't particularly "visible" or just take away aggravating limitations.
Still, here's a couple I think are great:
In GSS2 the console's configuration-change system detects that it's being run against a machine which is set to run the sysprep mini-setup, and it edits the sysprep.inf (or XML, for the Vista sysprep) to make the same changes. This means that if sysprep removes and reinstalls network adapters due to hardware changes, it Just Works. For some people this is going to be huge, and for others it's just "ehhh, they fixed a bug" - which is a reasonable thing to think, despite the fact that getting this done right took a lot of focus and effort and a total redesign of the whole post-clone configuration process.
In Windows PE, when you use Ghost32 now the volumes it just cloned are automatically mounted inside PE (and you can force the drive letters they get assigned with a switch) so you can script your own post-clone customizations without needing to fiddle with Diskpart.
For almost every tool we make, there is now a 32-bit version that runs in PE, not just ghost32 and gdisk32. Ghost Walker, omnifs, the new post-configuration tool, all have DOS and PE versions.
To make Ghost work with Vista wasn't trivial; instead of BOOT.INI, Vista uses a thing called the Boot Configuration Data database, which combines the functions of the old boot.ini with the volume assignments based on MBR disk signatures that previous systems kept. When you restore, Ghost doesn't like clear out the disk signature like it used to, because Vista wouldn't even boot if we did that. Instead, it goes through and updates the BCD database and the volume mount tables; this has all kinds of useful side-effects for cloning other Windows editions..
The client-initiated task UI works with all terminal service/remote desktop sessions, sorts the task names alphabetically, the Ghostsrv.exe makes directories automatically, and lots of other things like that which seem like trivial bugfixes but which are customer pain points that we've dealt with. These forums are relatively new and we didn't do everything that we wanted to that folks raised, but it's important to me that we started this process and we intend to continue it. We've started work on the next version and more of what has been asked for is coming.
> 2. Will I still need to create a separate image for each hardware variation
If you're asking if we've added hardware-independent restore as in BESR without sysprep, the answer is that no, in GSS2 that part still works as before through sysprep.
> how will this be different for Vista?
Mostly, we've tried hard to make it
not different; we tried to make sysprep in general more seamless when used in the console and to have all the versions Just Work. You do, unfortunately, need to be aware of the fact that the Vista version of sysprep.inf is now in XML if you supply your own customization.