HP Insight Control Server Provisioning 7.2 Update 2 Installation Guide

7 Generating and uploading WinPE to the appliance
WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment) is the service OS for the Windows operating system.
It is a special purpose operating system that is used when provisioning a target server with a
Windows OS. WinPE runs entirely in system memory on the target server and is used for deploying
Windows operating systems and for capturing and deploying Windows images.
HP ProLiant Gen8 and newer servers have a version of WinPE embedded on the server that can
be used for this purpose. However, if you are using servers older than the Gen8 series, or if you
will be PXE booting your Gen8 servers, you will need a version of WinPE on your appliance that
your servers can use to PXE boot from. Since WinPE cannot be shipped with your appliance, you
will need to generate it externally and upload it to the appliance. This step is required for most
users as part of the initial appliance setup and each time your appliance is updated.
NOTE: Since the WinPE image contains the latest ProLiant drivers, you will need to regenerate
WinPE each time you update your appliance or install a new appliance.
Insight Control server provisioning provides a WinPE image generation utility that can be
downloaded from your appliance and run on a Windows server to generate the required WinPE
image for you. The utility automatically adds required ProLiant drivers to WinPE so that it works
across all supported platforms.
The WinPE image you upload also includes the imageX utility. ImageX is required for all Windows
image capture and deployment jobs, regardless of the version of server or how the server was
booted. Even if you will only be using Gen8 server, if you want to do any image capture or deploy
operations, you will still need to generate and upload WinPE.
Requirements for generating WinPE images
The following conditions are required in order to generate WinPE images.
• An HP ProLiant server with at least a 2.0 GHz processor and 2 GB of memory, or an equivalent
virtual machine.
• The server must be running Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 x64 Standard or Enterprise
Editions as these are the only OSs that support the WAIK 3.0/3.1. The server may not be a
domain controller.
• You must have the English version of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK)
version 3.0 for Windows 7 installed, available at http://microsoft.com/download.
• You must also have the AIK Supplement for Windows 7 SP1 installed, available at http://
microsoft.com/download.
Procedure for generating WinPE images
Follow these procedures to generate WinPE images.
1. Make sure you have met the requirements specified in “Requirements for generating WinPE
images” (page 43).
2. Select Settings from the main menu.
3. Select Edit in the DHCP panel.
4. Download the Insight Control server provisioning WinPE image generation utility by clicking
Download Insight Control server provisioning WinPE image generation utility.
5. Launch the icsp-winpe-generate.exe file.
Requirements for generating WinPE images 43