Deploying Windows 7 to 75 Machines?

chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
edited July 2009 in Science & Tech
So here's the deal. I help run 45 workstations at our University and that number is going to shoot up another 30 workstations in the next month or two. As a 3D program we have pretty awesome hardware and we need 64-bit OS for throwing enough RAM at our renderings. As a university we don't really have the experts available to help us out so we pretty much hack this crap together as we go.

We've been an XP64 shop since the program started and it's worked great for us. We use Ghost to deploy or images to the machines and Ghostwalker with sysprep to give our machines the correct individual computer names, static IPs and domain information at the beginning of every semester and as needed when an OS goes bad or new hardware/software arrives.

Then Pixar went and finally added Windows 64 support for their render platform Renderman and it's something we've been waiting years for. Anyway, long story short, it only supports Vista 64 so it's time for us to upgrade.

My boss, hates Vista and we're going to try to go with Windows 7 (the RC for now). Trouble is, we can't get the sysprep unattended file to work with Windows 7 and Ghost. So my question is, are we even using the right tools to do this? If we are, does anyone know anything about generating a Windows 7 unattended file? I've been searching and searching for this and I'm frankly in over my knowledge level here. Suggestions?

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    In an odd bit of convenient synchronicity, this just got posted to the Windows Vista Team Blog: Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Beta.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited July 2009
    Super interesting, does that actually let you use your full customized OS image or just automate simple installations?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    I'm not in an environment that's had to evaluate RIS for Win 7, so I don't know.
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    Back when I was working at a University in a department maintaining 500+ computers, we used http://unattended.sourceforge.net

    Not sure if this is Windows 7 compatible or if it will be made so. It's a 3rd party solution that relies on having a dedicated install server. It doesn't take much power though, we ran ours on a Dell Optiplex GX260 that had been decommissioned. I was actually the one that set the system up originally. It was pretty slick but getting it up and running was time consuming. There's a fair amount of scripting involved.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited July 2009
    Crazy, ghostwalker with sysprep turned of ran it just fine, in the past that's failed but it looks like it was because of the RAID driver on of all things. Guess we're sticking with Ghost and it works!

    Thanks Thrax, I'll be keeping an eye on that.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited July 2009
    Ardichoke, just saw you're post, I'll check that out! Thanks!
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    Yeah, it's a neat system. Sounds like Ghost is probably the better solution though at least of the initial deployment since you got it to work. We generally used that to deploy our base system when rebuilding hosed computers (pretty much a weekly occurrence given the number of machines we had). It was nice since it was driver independent and we could slipstream the whole thing so that once we started it we just walked away and came back an hour later to our full base system being installed. From there we just had to add software that was department or user specific, test everything and deliver the machine.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2009
    If you've already got Ghost licensed I would stick with it. But depending on your time line going to RC1 seems like a waste of time since you can't upgrade from RC1 > real version. Seems like you are making more work for yourself the necessary.
  • wguimbwguimb Houston, Texas USA
    edited July 2009
    chrisWhite wrote:
    So here's the deal. I help run 45 workstations at our University and that number is going to shoot up another 30 workstations in the next month or two.....

    Hmm, that's a lot of work to get it done, and then come back through with Windows 7 gold a few months down the road? I would wait and get upgrade licenses or volume licenses for all those machines. Later, when the GA hits you can do the upgrades. But you probably want to have it all ready for the fall semester I would think.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    Hey, wguimb. Glad you registered. :) Cheers.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited July 2009
    wguimb, that's a good point. I think it's not going to be too big of a deal because it will just mean building a new ghost image and pushing it out to all our machines once it's available in volume so it's not the end of the world, but it's worth thinking about. I'll mention it to my boss.
  • wguimbwguimb Houston, Texas USA
    edited July 2009
    @Thrax, Hi and glad to here. I have actually been lurking here for many months. If a forum talks about Windows 7, I'm there. LOL

    @Chris - Don't let me sway you too much. You have to consider the savings in license costs since you get to use Windows 7 RC free basically until March 2010. :)
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