Deployment Solution

I have been doing some research and I have looked at the way HP and Dell both do their installations but they are very vanilla flavored.

We do not believe in imaging servers because it doesn't allow us the flexibility we need. We are huge fans of dynamically creating unattend files and populating them with Mass storage drivers as needed.

Now, with Windows 2008, this doesn't allow us the flexibility we are so used to.

I am interested in what people are doing with regards to scripted installations.

We have package servers globally around the world and we dynamically map package servers based on AD Sites and Subnets, so, I think that this is the most challenging part.

If we need to inject drivers do we build configuration sets on each package server for each OS?

That is our biggest challenge..

Any help or advice into this would be greatly appreciated it

You said you looked at the HP jobs (RDP?) so did you notice the settings in the default.xml file? The oem drivers it uses are called via a mapped drive from the unattend file (actually more flexible than injecting). example: f:\lib\oem..... I think. That being the case, you could try mapping a drive using your AD sites logic to g:\ then just change that path in the unattend file to g:\lib\oem and replicate the drivers/os out as needed. You could use the same logic to start it so if it is subnet A map g:\ to ServerA and if it is Subnet b map g:\ to ServerB. Then just change your SOSI like: G:\mydist\2008\setup.exe /unattend:unattend.xml

Then if it is an HP server just run the latest PSP http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizs...=3716246&lang=en&cc=us
.\mydrivers\ProLiant Support Pack 8.15 for Windows 2008\hpsum.exe

I don't know if DELL offers a driver pack ilke this.

Just some ideas.

Sorry for the delayed response. We have been making a tremendous amount or progress. We are using DataImages now with our scripted installations...

The hardest part is drawing up your logic for unattended builds in a multi-hardware vendor environment.

Goldy,

With DS and DS with RDP the xml files have the basic needs to install Windows 2008. You could provide your own XML files that include your set of requirements. This is using the OS scripted installed using the DS jobs not RDP. DS with RDP uses whatever the default.xml has and you could modify this too.

Nelson