Simplify Win2K Desktop Deployment

How do you quickly deploy 50 Windows 2000 Professional desktops loaded with all the necessary application software? While working as a consultant to a large communications company, I faced this challenge and decided to automate the process. I'd done a lot of reading about Windows Script Host (WSH), and the time seemed right to see whether I could make it work for me.

With disk-imaging software, Microsoft's Sysprep utility, and some basic knowledge of WSH scripting, I was able to take the drudgery out of desktop setup and configuration. The process I came up with has four main steps: Create a standard hard disk image, write a script to perform some required setup tasks, prepare the disk image for cloning, and clone the image onto the target workstations. You too can deploy workstations quickly and easily using the procedure and code described here (of course, you'll need to customize the code for your situation).

The Deployment Environment
In my situation, the company network is a mixture of Novell NetWare 4.x servers running in bindery emulation mode and Novell Directory Services (NDS) providing file-and-print services. The Windows NT 4.0 domain provides access to the application servers. The standard desktop OS is Windows 95, but inhouse application developers and administrators were using NT. Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0 and SMS 1.2 provide hardware and software inventory information, automated software distribution, and Help desk remote control.

Then, our Web application developers decided they needed Win2K Pro, so we needed a plan for deploying it. We decided to use our standard method for building a workstation: cloning a disk image onto each workstation.

Create a Hard Disk Image
To clone a workstation, you configure a computer with the desired OS and application software, then create an image of the disk that you can copy to another computer's hard disk. Disk cloning is a fast and efficient way to set up workstations, letting you build and configure a workstation with all its application software in less than 30 minutes.

Several companies make disk-cloning software. I've most often used Symantec Ghost and PowerQuest's Drive Image Pro, but all the products work similarly. You boot the computer to a DOS prompt, then start the disk-imaging software. You can create an image of an entire disk or a single partition and save it to another partition, drive, or network share. You can later restore the saved image to another disk. One feature to look for in disk-cloning software is media spanning, which lets you break up a disk image into smaller pieces. This feature is important if your image is larger than 640MB and you plan to store it on a CD-ROM.

Disk cloning works best in environments with a standard hardware platform. The video card, network adapter, sound cards, and so on should be the same in all the computers and should occupy the same slots. The hard disks don't all need to be the same size, but the disk image you're loading onto a disk must be no larger than the disk. You might need to maintain several different disk images to keep up with your changing hardware, but the fewer images you have to maintain, the better.

To prepare for disk imaging, load Win2K Pro on a representative workstation. Leave the local Administrator password blank and don't join the domain at this time. Install all the application software that a standard workstation should have, and configure the OS and each application.

Spend some time thinking about the OS and application settings that you would usually apply. Remember that the goal is to perform as little manual configuration as possible on each workstation. For example, if your word processing application has shared template directories, configure the directory location. My company was using an NT 4.0 domain as the back end, so I couldn't take advantage of Win2K Group Policy. However, I was able to configure a local policy to run a logoff script to update antivirus definitions.

Clean up the disk before you create the master image. Empty the Recycle Bin. Remove all the temporary files you and the setup process created. Clear the Start menu's Documents list and browser history. Remove all persistent drive mappings you created while loading applications. Run Chkdsk to ensure the disk has no file-system errors, and clear the Application, Security, and System event logs.

Create a 3.5" network boot disk. If you aren't sure how to perform this task, follow the instructions in Steve Ryles, "18 Steps to a TCP/IP Boot Disk," March 2001. Copy your disk-imaging software to another 3.5" disk. Restart the computer by using the network boot disk, then map a drive to a network share that has enough space to store the disk image. When the computer has finished booting, insert the second 3.5" disk and start the disk-imaging software; save the hard disk image to the network drive you just mapped.

After you've created the disk image, you can use a network boot disk to clone workstations directly from the image on the network share. Alternatively, you can burn the image on a CD-ROM and use the CD-ROM to clone workstations. If you follow the CD-ROM approach, you'll need a boot disk with CD-ROM drivers or you'll need to make the CD-ROM with the image on it bootable. Storing the image on a bootable CD-ROM makes workstation cloning fast and easy. You can find information about creating bootable CD-ROMs in the documentation that came with your CD-ROM burner or on the manufacturer's Web site.

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