If there's a part in your job description that mentions desktop imaging, bookmark this article. Now. Frequent contributor CondorMan picks up a slew of imaging best practices and lays down how you can use those tools on your belt to make it all happen.
This document accompanies the Best Practices for Standardized Desktop Images Presentation. It is intended as a guideline to creating a Standard Image and will introduce you to the methods you can use to create a Hardware Independent Image including HII Tools and the Altiris Hardware Independent Imaging Best Practices Document.
Deployment Server makes it possible to create and deploy disk images to similar hardware. With a little extra work, you can easily create and deploy disk images to any computer regardless of hardware. You will need to prepare your Deployment Server to create and distribute Hardware Independent Images; this must be done only once. Once you have done this, you can create and distribute these Images from any computer to any computer.
This document focuses on creating and distributing a Standardized Desktop Image. However, you can use Hardware Independent Images for the following scenarios and more:
In regards to having the agent in the base image, while building the image, we install the agent and then stop the agent service before it gets a guid. Just make sure it is set to automatic so when the imaged pc is booted for the first time, after mini-setup has run, the service starts and gets a guid for the pc it is on.