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Started: 08/07/2008 09:34 by MatF

WDS multicast of large XP WIM images

Hi all

We are now capturing all of our standard and specialist desktop and notebook XP images to WIMs and so far we've experienced nothng but improvements over our previous solution (smaller images, faster deployments, offline editing etc.). As a natural progression to this we are now starting bulk deployments via Windows Deployment services multicasts, and again we've seen a considerable reduction in how long it takes to get a usable PC. (The next step is to hook it up to SCCM and head for zero-touch deployments..)

Unfortunately we've hit a problem and I was hoping that someone may have already come across this and may be able to offer a solution:

Some of our specialist WIMs are quite large, and as such WDS multicast fails as it detects that there is not enough available hard drive space available to store the temporary installation files during the offline setup. Given that the target PCs have 2nd hard drives, is anyone aware of a method to get utilise the 2nd drive as the location for temporary storage?

thanks

Mat

Posted: 23/07/2008 11:42 by MatF

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I've now got a workaround for this so thought I'd add it to the posting should anyone else experience this same problem, although it does mean getting your hands dirty with wdsutil & wdsmcast at the command line to manage your WDS server

Using wdsutil create your namespace on the server pointing to the location of the file to be transferred (doesn't just have to be a .WIM, could potentially be anything).

Edit your boot image to include wdsmcast and imagex (available as part of the Svr 2008 WAIK).

To your boot image also add a script that runs diskpart to prep your disks then runs wdsmcast to transfer your .WIM to the 2nd disk, then runs imagex to apply the image, then deletes the file at the end of the process.

Here is a useful article on wdsutil & wdsmcast.

Mat

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