Datasheet
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Minimizing Deployment Time
minimizing dEploymEnt timE
Systems administrators are busy people. Although sitting in front of a computer
watching a little grey bar go across a screen during the installation process might
seem fun the rst few times, there are probably better things that you can be doing.
In this section, you learn about methods through which you can speed up deploy-
ment of Windows Server 2008 R2. These include:
Creating a USB device to deploy Windows Server 2008 R2 directly3
Conguring Windows Deployment Services to deploy Windows Server 2008 R2 3
to more than one computer at a time
Deploying from a USB Flash Drive
USB ash devices generally have quicker read performance than optical media. This
means that performing a direct deployment from a USB ash drive is the quickest
method of getting Windows Server 2008 R2 onto a server. With USB 3.0 becoming
more prevalent, the speed benet of deploying operating systems using this method
will only increase. As USB ash drives are writable media, you can make modica-
tions to the install.wim image, such as injecting drivers or updates, without having
to burn a new installation DVD.
The drawback to using USB ash drives as deployment devices is that you need
to muck around with BIOS settings on each server to ensure that it will boot from the
USB ash drive. Also, you need to go through the steps of preparing each USB ash
drive and ensuring that the answer les and WIM images are kept up-to-date, if you
are using more than one. If you are regularly performing bulk deployments of server
operating systems, you may prefer to go with Windows Deployment Services (WDS).
To prepare a USB ash drive so that you can use it to deploy Windows Server 2008 R2,
perform the following general steps:
1. Open an elevated command prompt on a computer running Windows 7 or
Windows Server 2008 R2.
2. Enter the command Diskpart and then list disk. Determine which of the con-
nected disks represents the USB ash drive.
3. From the Diskpart prompt, issue the command select disk X, where X is the
number associated with the USB ash drive.
You can
also place an
unattended
installation file on
a USB stick and
update that as
necessary, allowing
rapid installation
to occur without
the necessity of
walking through
the installation
wizard.
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