Alternatives to Window Deployment Services

WDS is your best bet I'm sure, but you can also look into using Microsoft sysprep

That is the best Microsoft image deployment solution - for customizable image deployment, you could use MDT but if you don't have a lot of variables then I would stick with WDS. XP images kinda suck but Win7 is very easy to manage.

It's been a while since I used WDS and now use SCCM 2007 (hopefully 2012 soon). I'm not sure if SCCM is free, it should be if you have a licensing agreement with Microsoft. Anyway, it's great, create your image and setup the server to automate everything for you. Why would you guys not recommend SCCM? Am I missing something about WDS??

I would recommend Altiris, I was so in love with it but the price is way too much. Ahh real-time pc management

One of my functions at work is laptop/desktop deployment. I used to use Norton Ghost, and it was ok. I started using WDS about a year ago, and it's far and away better. You can customize and automate pretty much everything. I hook up 4 computers to a KVM, and then start the install process using WDS, and can have each of them on the domain, software installed, and polished up in a matter of a few hours. It's a nice tool.

As others have mentioned, Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is a very powerful and simple to use deployment tool. However, with that said, Game Junky mentioned MDT, also known as the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. First off, MDT is entirely free. Next, MDT acts as a common console for all of your images and can be used to deploy Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008R2. Using MDT, you can easily add both applications and drivers, manage Windows updates, create task sequences, prompt for a computer name, join a domain, add a KMS or MAK product key, create an administrator account, specify time zone, etc. You can also import all user data into the new environment using the User State Migration Tool (also free). In addition to creating standard client task sequences, you can create sysprep and capture task sequences that will do just that – sysprep and capture an image of your reference machine. To become familiar with the process of using MDT, you might want to check out these videos from the Springboard Series page on TechNet:

Deployment Day Session 1: Introduction to MDT 2012
Deployment Day Session 2: MDT 2012 Advanced

The best part is that you can integrate MDT with WDS via PXE boot or you can also create bootable media directly from MDT. Upon booting into the LiteTouchPE environment, you can select the image you wish to deploy, which task sequence and image you wish to use and then proceed to enter the necessary computer name, domain you wish to join and all relative information.

To summarize: once you have the image captured and imported into MDT, you can add applications to a task sequence that also specifies your additional needs including installing updates and patches since you can integrate it with Windows Update or WSUS to make sure the deployment is fully updated. Alternatively, you can put the updates into MDT as packages to be installed during deployment.

Finally, there is also a great deal of resources for various deployment, virtualization and management scenarios available from the Springboard Series on TechNet.

Hope this helps and keep us posted on your progress!

Jessica
Windows Outreach Team – IT Pro