I have spent a good portion of my time these days creating Windows Vista images so I thought I would share some tips that we have learned along the way with our image process.
Script All Your Customizations.
The more you script the less likely you are to make mistakes which will provide you with reliable and dependable long term results as well as a way to document what you have done to your image. We use Wise Installmaster for this to make it simple, but use what you are most familiar with.
If you are planning to produce both 64-bit and 32-bit images from the same scripts you will likely have to perform additional up front work to ensure that entries for things like Policies and Explorer settings don't end up in the wrong place.
You may not be able to script absolutely everything. In those cases you should keep some really good docs.
UPDATE: To clarify this a little this is refearing to any customizations to your base image. Examples of these might include custom registry entries for explorer, wallpapers, user tiles, etc.
Automate Your Installs
If your image contains applications ensure that those installs are also automated either via MST/MSP's if they are MSI's or by whatever mechanism used to customize those setups. This will also give you the reliability and dependability an image needs.
Virtual Machines make it easy
The use of a product like VMWare or Virtual PC can make life worlds easier. It gives me the ability to build a plain or "vanilla" machine and then save a copy of that off before I start to apply my customization. This way I don't have to restart at the beginning every time I start a new image, bonus!
Another best practice is to copy off a backup of the VM before you sysprep in case you forgot something. You will notice I don't say "create a snapshot" snapshots don't work when creating an image once you mount the drive in another machine you won't be able to get back to any of the snapshots.
The other benefit you get from VMWare is that it will also provide you with a quick way to "mount" that hard drive. You simply use the VMWare mount utility on the Sysprep'd drive letter.
Minimize Drivers in your reference Image
You want to minimize the amount of drivers that you use in your base image. This will ensure your image works on more platforms. Now this may seem counter intuitive, but the reality is that any drivers that are in your reference image may cause problems for other platforms (such as Intel power management blue screening an AMD box). So don't load drivers if they aren't included in Windows Vista unless needed to complete the image. Instead these drivers should be loaded into the driver store so that they are loaded during setup as the machine wakes up. To do this you would inject the driver into the driver store using PNPUtil –a and point it to the inf file of the driver.
Keep a build document.
It is a good practice even with all the automation that you put into your image that you keep a master document of the steps that have gone into the document and if not documented elsewhere "why" many of the design decisions were made on certain settings. These questions will arise at some point and having the reasoning written down while it is fresh is far easier than trying to dig it up years later.
Hardware
The ideal piece of hardware, at least at the time being for me, is to run the Virtual machines on an AMD box with the x64 extensions. This is because from a 32 bit version of Windows XP using VMWare I can create both 32 bit and x64 images Windows Vista images. If this isn't in your standard hardware offering and you don't want to purchase the hardware you can use two hardware platforms. A second hard drive and additional memory are also wise investments.
Hopefully these were somewhat helpful, if you have some tips that you would like to share please post them in the forums or email me using the site here.
Posted
Dec 12 2006, 08:04 PM
by
Josh Phillips
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