Most of the attention surrounding the upcoming Windows Vista has been on the sexy things like Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (formerly Avalon) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) (formerly Indigo). Vista goes much further and includes some new tools for IT departments. Anyone who’s dealt with imaging machines and Windows / Office Roll-outs know the pain involved and will appreciate some of these new technologies.
Vista comes with file-based disk imaging technology (see TechNet article for the specifics) It uses the new Microsoft Windows Imaging Format (WIM) image format. Unlike existing sector-based solutions, WIM is file-based. This change allows you to do some cool things.
Here are some of my favorites:
* “Hardware-agnostic.” You can use one image that will work on multiple computer hardware configurations. If you’re responsible for an environment with multiple computer versions and capabilities, this should banish the hassle of maintaining one image per configuration.
* Multiple image files in one WIM file. The WIM format supports multiple images in one actual file. You can have images with and without certain apps (e.g. Microsoft Access).
* Boot from the WIM file. You can specify one of the images as bootable and boot directly from that image.
* Compression and single instancing. If you have three images in the WIM file (image 1, image 2, image 3) that use file A, WIM stores file A once and points image 1, image 2, and image 3 to that single instance of file A.
* Edit the WIM file. As new patches or drivers are released, you can apply those changes to the WIM file (and the multiple image files within). That’s a heckuva lot easier than Window’s process of setting the image file, making sure the right settings are in the profile, using Sysprep, and then creating the image.
* Image partitions of any size. Sector-based imaging applications allow you to deploy the image to a partition that is at least the same size as the source partition. You can create an image on a 60 GB partition and deploy it to a partition of 6 GB.
* Non-destructive deployment. Applying the image doesn’t destroy the existing contents of the drive.
* Command line interface. The XImage application runs from the command line and is relatively straightforward.
* Script to your heart’s content. Use the scripting capabilities of Windows Vista to control the process.
There will probably be additional tools in the resource kit or other deployment packages.