We are a small company that provides solutions for ventilation systems. Part of the solution is a "controller" which communicates with the ventilation equipment.
These controllers are simply Dell computers that come with our Windows 7 system image on them and sometimes some special hardware.
We typically do a batch of 10 controllers at a time. We have been using Norton Ghost to apply the system image, but this process breaks because Dell changes the system configuration often, and our Windows image now does not contain the correct drivers. This is especially a problem when they change the RAID controller.
To improve this, I see 2 options:
- use some kind of virtualization and install a hypervisor on each PC. This would solve the driver problem, but probably cause trouble with our special hardware.
- use some method of adding the proper drivers to our Windows image in offline mode.
I haven't got much experience in either of these approaches. How would you solve our problem?
Answer
There are a lot of ways to do this, but the best way may be to keep the source image a virtual machine, and use this for cloning your destination systems. With this scenario you can always boot up your source vm and apply updates, make changes, etc and always have it ready to deploy where you need to go. The image can also be hardware independent and deployed across a number of hardware configurations.
The microsoft articles on this are pretty good so I hope these help you. In these links there are also video tutorials.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/alanlemarquand/archive/2010/01/18/building-windows-7-images.aspx
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/springboard/archive/2009/11/08/part-4-choosing-and-image-strategy-and-building-windows-7-system-images.aspx
You might find this step by step guide the best:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee523217%28WS.10%29.aspx
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