Chapter 11. Preparing to deploy Windows
ConfigMgr is excellent at many tasks, and one of the tasks at its core is deploying Windows. Deployment involves taking a copy of Windows and using ConfigMgr to install it across a wide variety of systems: laptops, desktops, virtual disks, portable media, and virtual machines.
As shown in figure 11.1, this chapter is all about preparing to deploy Windows in your lab. As tempting as it is to jump straight into the deployment, critical resources must be set up first, so that’s what you’ll be doing.
A Windows operating system image is a self-contained file using the Windows Imaging Format (WIM). A WIM differs from other image formats such as ISO because it’s file-based. It’s designed to store files and then use an image index to reference those files.
A WIM file can contain multiple image indexes because it has to store each file only once. For example, say you use ConfigMgr or MDT to build a custom image, and then later use the same process to build another image that has extra applications. You can store both images in the same WIM file, but files that are common to both images are stored only once, as shown in figure 11.2. In this way, WIM is an effective and efficient way of building custom images, which is why they’re the foundation of operating system deployment (OSD) in ConfigMgr.