Deployment and Imaging Group

Hello

Can anyone provide me document which says why DHCP environment required for Deployment Solution and how much is the challenge we have to face if dont have DHCP Environment.

DHCP is a requirement only for PXE imaging as the PXE protocol requires DHCP. See this wikipedia entry for more details,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment

Enterprise environments requiring static IP addresses normally still have these configured centrally (DHCP allows you to tie MAC addresses to IPs).  If DHCP is in general a 'no-no', might be worth asking if you can have a 'deployment' VLAN which has DHCP. The once deployed you can ship them to users with static IPs.

If you really can't have DHCP at all, in any form, then things get messy; you'll need to setup static IPs for imaging CDs/DVDs/USB sticks to deliver your PCs and then set your client IP post image deployment.

Hi ianatkin

Thanks for your response.

We dont have DHCP at all our environment.

We have installed deployment solution 6.9. We are trying to upgrade All windows xp embedded POS ready 2009 system to windows 7 professional.

We have captured one standard windows 7 image and trying to deploy image on system on which windiws xp embedded POS Ready 2009 operating system installed. Here image gets deploying on the system but it failes to installed NIC drivers and if the NIC drivers are not installed then how system will take NIC drivers from Drivers Database.

Secondaly - As I said we dont have DHCP environment it is necessary to boot system using CDs/DVDs/USB because through PXE boot also we able to boot system by assigning static IP.

Hi CBZ9104,

To second Ian's response, DHCP is only required for PXE boot; it's a prerequisite of the PXE standard, that is out of Symantec's hands. To use a boot disk (DVD/USB) DHCP is not required, you can set static IPs.

In regards to the NIC driver not loading, you should be able to use DeployAnywhere to add the drivers as part of the distribute image task. First you would need to add the correct drivers to the DeployAnywhere Driver Database, once that's done simply ticking the checkbox to use DeployAnywhere should cause the driver to be injected after imaging before booting up.

-Eric

Hi Eric_Olsen

Thanks for the reply.

We using DS 6.9 SP6 

We have installed all the required NIC drivers and we using DeployAnywhere option too. Find attach screenshot where we added the drivers. Just let me know it is correct option to add DeployAnywhere Drivers or not. because in DS 7.1 and 7.5 there separate to two option for adding drivers i.e DeployAnywhere and Preboot.

There is one big doubt we have that we deploying Windows 7 image and when we installed Windows 7 on any Desktop or Laptop we did not installed any NIC drivers manually then how here we facing NIC drivers issue.

DS 6.9 also has two locations to add drivers, one for preboot and one for DA; That is the correct location for adding drivers to DA. If that is still not working, you should call in to support so we can take a closer look at why DA might not be using that driver for that particular system.

Hi Eric_Olsen

We have added drivers into Deployanywhere and re-created WinPe but still the issue is same.

If we tried to capture image by using ghost and deploy the same will it be resolve my problem. Also If i use Linux PE will it be beneficial for me.

Hi,

This thread has moved significantly on from the original question of "Why is DHCP required for Deployment Solution?" to "I need help installing WinPE drivers!"

As this thread has now departed from the original question, it's not getting the visibility it should. I'm therefore splitting this thread into two. The post for the drivers issue can be found here,

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/need-help-getting-winpe-drivers-loaded-ds69

Kind Regards,
Ian./

Hi CBZ9104,

Do you need anymore help on the topic of

Can anyone provide me document which says why DHCP environment required for Deployment Solution and how much is the challenge we have to face if dont have DHCP Environment.

 

I can only add on this that DHCP it is simply expected in the enterprise by vendors, including Microsoft. So much so from Microsoft's point of view that when bugs were found in their WAIK with regards to setting up static IP unattend XML files, they were rather nonplussed about it. That's not to say local static IP addresses aren't supported, but you can be fairly sure that static IP assignment testing doesn't feature highly in their testing matrices.

One common misconception with DHCP is that it's assumed that dhcp client IP address will always changes, thus forcing you as the network admin to lose traceability. This is not not the case. Whilst DHCP allows for dynamic pools, it also allows for static IPs where these allocations are managed centrally by DHCP. 

In short, rather of statically assigning a local machine to an IP on the machine itself, you do this on the DHCP server so that the client MAC address is always tied to a specific IP.

Here is a Microsoft KB that describes the advantages of DHCP over local static IP address assignment,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170062

Kind Regards,
Ian./

While it is not my preferred method, I have both captured images from and deployed images to systems that had static set IP addresses.

I detail how to create a boot disk here: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/create-boot-disk-deployment-solution-75

"Click next and you will have the option of selecting DHCP or Static for your boot disc.  For capturing one particular image I needed a static IP address and this will all depend on your enviroment.  Most will use DHCP.  Static selection presented some problems for me because the bat file generated for the static option didn’t work as well as i thought it would because the network device on my vm that I wanted to capture didn’t use the same name that is written in to the bat. Fortunately, you can modify this later."

"As I mentioned, if you do decide to go static for your network adapter, you may have to modify it.  The default name that Symantec had written in didn’t match my VM and so I changed it here.  You can also just use DHCP, wait an hour for it to time out and then type the commands in manually yourself and then once configured properly rerun runagent.bat once in automation."

Someone with greater abilities and time than I would be able to generate useful scripts to allow static IP imaging.  It doesnt appear to be impossible, just need time to figure it out and its not something I have right now, nor a requirement to do so.