Datasheet

19
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
Conguring 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 benet of deploying operating systems using this method
will only increase. As USB ash drives are writable media, you can make modica-
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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