2.3. Automated Deployment

Once an organization gets beyond about 100 desktops, deploying clients and servers becomes a large task. To minimize the effort involved in deploying the operating system, a set of master images are created based on the hardware that the organization supports. Images also reflect the operating system configuration, application suites such as Microsoft Office, and other custom user settings. Images are typically deployed from an image store, which is most commonly kept on a network share. For very large deployments, servers for controlling a deployment as well as supporting image deployment are often dedicated to the purpose.

Microsoft has developed a set of deployment technologies to help organizations roll out new ...

Get Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008: Implementation and Administration now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.