Infosys Microsoft Alliance and Solutions blog

« BizTalk Business Rules Composer's Namespace issue | Main | "Access Denied" error whuile launching a Softgrid virtualized application on Vista »

ZTI of Vista over WAN

We successfully tested Zero Touch Installation of Microsoft Vista on a desktop having Windows XP SP2 installed using SMS OSD Feature pack and BDD over a WAN connection. The lab setup to test this consisted of following components:

 

Lab setup at WAN site# 1:
Box 1: Windows Server 2003 having SMS 2003 with OSD feature pack and BDD RC1 installed and configured                   
Box2: Windows Server 2003 on which we had:
Active Directory with a test domain created
DHCP Server with two scopes created for WAN site# 1 and 2.
DNS Server
Lab setup at WAN site# 2:
Target machines running XP SP2. These machines had SMS advanced client installed on them.
Network Setup:

  1. Create a separate VLAN for both WAN sites.
  2. Create a test domain. Ensure that the target machines are on the test domain.
  3. Create 2 scopes for WAN site 1 and 2 on the DHCP server.
  4. IP helper statement to be set on WAN site# 2 router. This is to ensure that the target machines get DHCP IP address from WAN site# 1 DHCP Server.
  5. Access Control Lists to be applied on the routers of both the WAN sites to access each other. Ensure that other network access is denied. Ensure to give permit UDP ACLs for bootps and bootpc
After the network set up was up and running, we created an image package with a 1.8 GB Vista image and included all 5 phases of BDD in the program. These programs would validate the target machine and also do a state capture and restore using USMT. Finally we created an advertisement scheduled to deploy this image package to the target machines over the WAN between site 1 and 2.
Result: Both the machines got re-imaged to Vista and all the data present was restored. After checking the logs we found out that the entire process (all the 5 phases of BBD) took about 50 minutes. We tested this again few more times and found that the average time was about 40-50 mins for install of a 1.8GB vista image over a shared WAN connection.

Posted by Sanjay Dandin on March 13, 2007 10:44 AM |

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://infosysblogs.com/microsoft-mt/mt-tb.fcgi/76

Comments

What was the type and size of the WAN link to get such results ?

Posted by: Jose ALONSO | April 13, 2007 01:18 PM

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)