Windows VLK and Ghost

Hi,

I need to create a Windows 7 image to deploy to a large number of PCs.

I'm familiar with the Sysprep process for XP-
1/ Create the unattended answer file
2/ Run Sysprep
3/ Shutdown the PC
4/ Pull the image using ghost
5/ Image the rest of the PCs with the newly created ghost image
6/ Restart the PCs and let the unattended file do it's job

Basically, I have a reference PC built using a VLK installation and customizations made and this needs to be sysprepped and a Ghost image created in order to deploy the installation to the rest of the PCs.

Anybody have any ideas?

Are you married to using ghost, or would you be able to use something like MDT + WDS on a 2008/R2 server to deploy?

Unfortunatley, ghost is the only option I have at the moment. I do have a WDS but it's built on Server 2003 so I haven't even bothered looking into using it.

WDS on Server 2003 would work, although you wouldn't be able to do things like multicasting. If you're using ghost, technically you do the same sort of process with Win7 that you would with XP - sysprep, capture, deploy. You probably want to look into using WSIM to create your unattend.xml to use with sysprep, of course. This is one of the reasons I suggest using MDT + WDS, as it makes it pretty easy to deploy captured images with a nice HTA wizard front-end in the WinPE environment to answer the questions you would normally have to put into your unattend (and these can be automated via .ini files as well).

How difficult is it to setup MDT and WDS? I'm going to be replacing XP with Windows 7 Pro on 30 systems, and would love to do this as easily as possible. I only need three separate images, and I do have a MAK license key.

MDT + WDS is pretty painless - you install WDS, configure DHCP 66 and 67 to point to your WDS server, then install MDT and create a deployment share. Import an OS, perhaps some apps, drivers, and packages into MDT, and then create a task sequence (you will probably want to use the Standard Client sequence). Last, update the deployment share and then add the LiteTouch<arch>.wim file from \DeploymentShare\Boot\ to WDS, and PXE boot a client to it.