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Does this guy seem to sidestep the question about slipstreaming Vista?
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Dan Warne: What about the process of updating the Vista image with service packs and patches? The process for slipstreaming in XP is relatively straightforward once you know how but it isn’t exactly intuitive, or as easy as running Windows Update.
John Pritchard: Well, in Vista, we can do that once the machine is built and on the network; you can use WSUS, or if they have an SMS environment you can patch the deployed machine in either of those two ways, so that doesn’t change.
But once you build an image, it poses a problem because it’s likely to be out of date as soon as you close it off. So, with that, you can take the image, and say, “OK, I’ll build a command line file that enables me to mount the image, apply the images to the OS while it is mounted, and then seal up and commit the changes to the image, and distribute the image.”
Dan Warne: So is there an automated way to grab all the patches off Windows Update and automatically apply them to an image? Or would you have to download each patch individually and manually apply them?
John Pritchard: You’ve got the image effectively mounted as a file system, so you’d apply the patches as command-line patches. You would have to get each patch and apply it. It’s like slipstreaming SP2 into an SP1 installation.
But if you have an image that’s, say 2.5GB, instead of patching it and having to push that entire image file out to different file shares, what you can do is instead of sending out the whole patched image again, you simply make your patch commands and then just send out the command line to mount the image and apply the patches locally and unmount the image. So at each point, they can run a series of batch files to update their image.
Dan Warne: So, in terms of customising the Vista install DVD to remove software components. Because inevitably in a large operating system there’s a lot of stuff in there that people don’t want or use, like in XP, the MSN Browser. Is there an interface for configuring WIM that is a bit more componentised, rather than just looking at the files on the disk? Can you actually select apps in Windows and just get them ripped out of the image?
John Pritchard: Yes, where I’d go to for that is if you take the Microsoft DVD that will be shipped out, we again go back to the unattend.xml and you can build an unattend.xml that says, “I want this, I want this, I want my partitions configured like this, do all that but also select that you want this game, but not solitaire, or whatever.”
You can then put that unattend.xml file on a USB key and if you plug that in when Vista is installing, it will base its install process on the unattend.xml instruction file. It means that you don’t have to build a custom DVD for a custom install. Consumers can take the System Image Manager, build up the unattend as they would like, put it on a USB key and use that to install from the Microsoft-standard image file.
Dan Warne: Cool, so that’s presumably a new feature in Vista? I knew you could script Windows installations previously, but you’ve never been able to run that script from a USB key, right?
John Pritchard: Yes, that’s right. This is where we’ve got the ability to look for the USB port. It’s like having a WINNT.SIF file being looked for in the root of a floppy drive. What I do for my customers is they have the bootable Vista build DVD and they put their unattend on a USB key, which saves them having to rebuild their DVDs all the time.
John Pritchard: Well, in Vista, we can do that once the machine is built and on the network; you can use WSUS, or if they have an SMS environment you can patch the deployed machine in either of those two ways, so that doesn’t change.
But once you build an image, it poses a problem because it’s likely to be out of date as soon as you close it off. So, with that, you can take the image, and say, “OK, I’ll build a command line file that enables me to mount the image, apply the images to the OS while it is mounted, and then seal up and commit the changes to the image, and distribute the image.”
Dan Warne: So is there an automated way to grab all the patches off Windows Update and automatically apply them to an image? Or would you have to download each patch individually and manually apply them?
John Pritchard: You’ve got the image effectively mounted as a file system, so you’d apply the patches as command-line patches. You would have to get each patch and apply it. It’s like slipstreaming SP2 into an SP1 installation.
But if you have an image that’s, say 2.5GB, instead of patching it and having to push that entire image file out to different file shares, what you can do is instead of sending out the whole patched image again, you simply make your patch commands and then just send out the command line to mount the image and apply the patches locally and unmount the image. So at each point, they can run a series of batch files to update their image.
Dan Warne: So, in terms of customising the Vista install DVD to remove software components. Because inevitably in a large operating system there’s a lot of stuff in there that people don’t want or use, like in XP, the MSN Browser. Is there an interface for configuring WIM that is a bit more componentised, rather than just looking at the files on the disk? Can you actually select apps in Windows and just get them ripped out of the image?
John Pritchard: Yes, where I’d go to for that is if you take the Microsoft DVD that will be shipped out, we again go back to the unattend.xml and you can build an unattend.xml that says, “I want this, I want this, I want my partitions configured like this, do all that but also select that you want this game, but not solitaire, or whatever.”
You can then put that unattend.xml file on a USB key and if you plug that in when Vista is installing, it will base its install process on the unattend.xml instruction file. It means that you don’t have to build a custom DVD for a custom install. Consumers can take the System Image Manager, build up the unattend as they would like, put it on a USB key and use that to install from the Microsoft-standard image file.
Dan Warne: Cool, so that’s presumably a new feature in Vista? I knew you could script Windows installations previously, but you’ve never been able to run that script from a USB key, right?
John Pritchard: Yes, that’s right. This is where we’ve got the ability to look for the USB port. It’s like having a WINNT.SIF file being looked for in the root of a floppy drive. What I do for my customers is they have the bootable Vista build DVD and they put their unattend on a USB key, which saves them having to rebuild their DVDs all the time.
The full article HERE
We're going to have to do something when SP1 comes out
