Install Windows like a PRO! Windows Deployment Services Tutorial

what it's the holidays i can't drink beer all the time [Music] today's video is brought to you by nordpass are you tired of trying to remember all of your username and password combinations have you run out of room on your monitor for more sticky notes nordpass's user-friendly desktop and mobile applications allow you to easily access all of your passwords on any device from wherever you are and with their zero knowledge architecture your data is encrypted on your own device before it ever reaches their servers visit nordpass.com crafttoday to download it for free and take the hassle out of password management that's nordpass.com craft welcome back to craft computing everyone as always i'm jeff today i'm gonna answer one of the questions that i get quite often here on the channel and that is how do i install windows onto all the pcs that i build i know that seems like a really stupid question up front but when you build as many pcs as i do installing windows can get a little bit tedious especially when you have to do it from scratch every single time so let's start with what is windows deployment services it's a service that runs as part of windows server that allows you to capture customize and deploy windows imaging files what is a windows image file essentially it is a snapshot of a windows installation including all of the software group policy and registry edits that you've made to that install it also strips out all of the identifying information from that pc allowing you to install that version of windows that you've customized over to another pc as if it was a brand new installation using windows deployment services you can deploy windows to a new pc over the network including all of the additional software you've added plus custom driver packages for the hardware that you're installing on now wds is not the tool you want to use if you're only installing windows onto a couple of pcs a single time however if you're doing mass deployments of pcs where the configuration has to match across all the installs or in situations like around my house where i'm constantly formatting disks and installing windows on brand new hardware it does make a lot of sense and helps streamline the process today i'm going to be running through the basics of how to get windows deployment services up and running including installing the service onto a windows server adding boot and install images and then getting your clients to boot up over the network and install windows in a future video i do plan on going through how to customize a windows image including adding additional software configurations and installing driver packages that are unique to the client pc you're installing on but for right now let's go ahead and run through the setup first up you're going to need a windows server to work on i think that was pretty obvious in this case i have a windows server 2019 standard evaluation edition however you can use just about any version of windows server that you'd like pretty much all of them are compatible with windows deployment services and there's not even a break in what operating systems you can install you can install all the way up to windows 10 20 h2 on even a 2008 r2 box this particular virtual machine is inside a proxmox vm and here are all the settings that i have for that i've got 8 gigabytes of memory 4 cpus i am running with the ovmf uefi bios and the q35 machine type and i would definitely recommend that for any windows installs that you put onto proxmox for the hard drive i allocated 250 gigabytes so we can store the windows image files however this is just for the tutorial if you were going to run this even in a small business environment let alone enterprise i would definitely recommend installing the windows image files onto a separate hard drive or even over network storage however for a home lab setup this works just fine moving over to the 2019 server we can go ahead and start our install first up go to the start menu and open up the server manager once that's come up we're going to go up to manage and then add roles and features first couple of windows we're going to go ahead and click on next next and next when you come up with the server roles we're going to scroll all the way to the bottom to windows deployment services and check that box there's a couple of dependencies that will automatically pop up just go ahead and click on the add features button then click on next and click on next again under roll services we're going to make sure that both deployment server and transport server are checked and then go ahead and click on next and if your install looks like my install go ahead and click on install after a couple minutes you'll see that the installation succeeded on your server and we can go ahead and click on close we're going to close our server manager then we're going to go down to the start menu and we're going to type in deployment services and you should see this application right here since i don't want to search for it every time i want to open it i'm going to go ahead and pin that both to the start menu and to the taskbar i like to do this for all of my windows servers just so i know what service is installed on them and be able to very easily open up the management consoles so now if i log into this box i can see it has windows deployment services installed right there on the taskbar we're going to open up windows deployment services we're going to open the servers tab and then you can see your server appears right here but there's a little uh warning sign right there that's because we have to configure our server first go ahead and right click on your server and click on configure server there are only a couple prerequisites to running windows deployment services you either have to be the member of an active directory domain which again we're doing a standalone install here you have to have an active dhcp server and an active dns server i think pretty much every network you're ever going to work on qualifies with both of those so if that all looks good go ahead and click on next right here is where we select either integrated with active directory or a standalone install again the installation procedure is pretty much identical and in my case we're just going to do a standalone server so go ahead and click on next next up is the remote install folder location this is actually where windows deployment services stores all of the windows images that it will be deploying out to clients by default it goes to the c drive under remote install however if you are installing on a different disk or onto network storage you're going to want to define that here for my use case again i'm just going to use the c drive remote install and go ahead and click on next now wds will warn you if you are installing onto the c drive as it's not recommended to run on the eos but again for a home lab environment that's just fine so i'm going to click yes to continue under pixie server initial settings i'm going to click on respond to all clients known and unknown this will unlock windows deployment services to allow any client on your network to netboot in and get windows installed and go ahead and click on next and once you see the screen windows deployment services is now up and running now right here is a box to add images to the server right now we're going to uncheck that for the moment and we'll come back to that later for now go ahead and click on finish once wds is installed and up and running you should be able to click the little carrot next to your server and see a number of folders drop down the ones we're going to be interested in today are the install images and boot images so the next logical question is probably going to be where does one actually acquire a windows image file great question i'm glad you asked luckily i happen to have a readily available source to find them and that is a windows installation iso now both of these i downloaded directly off the microsoft website first up we have a windows server 2019 evaluation which is exactly the disk that i used to install this virtual machine on and i have a windows 20 h2 standard iso for installing windows home and windows professional we're going to do the easy one first which happens to be the windows server evaluation and i'll show you why in just a second so open up that iso we're going to go to sources and then there's two files that we're looking for there is boot.wim and install.wim next i'm going to open up the c drive and go to remote install which is the location of windows deployment services i'm going to copy the boot.wim file and the install.wim file i love that copying an iso file from the network is literally the longest step in this installation process now pretty much every single windows iso includes the same naming scheme for these two files so that is boot.wim and install.wim however the contents are always vastly different so i'm gonna go and rename them so we don't forget what they are so this is server 2019 boot and server 2019 eval all right we are ready to add these to windows deployment services so i'm going to go to the wds manager i'm going to right click on boot images and i'm going to say add boot image under file location we're going to go to browse we're going to go to that c drive remote install and then i'm going to double click on the server 2019 boot.wim click on next we can go ahead and leave this name as default and then click on next again and if everything's done right when you click on boot images you should be able to see that we now have a boot image on our windows deployment server now the boot.wim is essentially the windows installer program it allows you to boot up a pc to a gui environment however it doesn't actually store the information to install windows that is kept in the install.wim and that's what we're going to set up next so go ahead and go to install images we're going to right click and say add install image now this part is pretty important we're going to create a new image group and i'm going to name it server 2019 it is actually very important that you do not mix different versions of windows now i say different versions in 2016 images versus 2019 images or windows 10 1709 versus windows 10 20 h2 those are drastically different install processes however you can store different skus with each other so in this case we're going to store both 2019 data center and standard editions under the same image group so group name server 2019 and go ahead and click on next under file location we're going to browse to the install.wim which we have renamed server 2019 eval so open up that wim file click on next and now we can see that there are actually four windows installs inside of this single image file i'm going to leave all of them selected so i will have multiple choices when i do boot up into the setup environment and we are not going to use the default name and description and i'll show you why in just a second so go ahead and click on next so the first image file is windows server 2019 server standard core uh number one that name is too long to display on most windows setup screens so you're not going to be able to distinguish windows server standard from windows server standard core and those are two very different installs so because everything that we're going to be installing is always windows i like to delete windows from the front of it and then just name it standard core this helps with a lot of confusion later on also when you start doing customized images you want to give it a custom name so you know which image you're installing onto which client and we're gonna do essentially that same thing all the way through so this is windows server standard so we're gonna delete the core from that one this is data center core and finally we have data center all right and your window should look something like this with the four images that you're adding windows server 2019 standard and standard core data center and data center core and if everything looks good go ahead and click on next and if everything succeeded you should say operation is complete and go ahead and click on finish and if you did everything correctly under install images you should see the new server 2019 install group followed by four different versions of windows server standard standard core data center and data center core and at the most basic level windows deployment services is ready to go you can install these four images onto any machine that you would like right now over the network so let's go ahead and give that a test drive i'm going to jump back over to proxmox and you can see i've created a brand new windows server 2019 test virtual machine this is a brand new vm with no operating system installed it's set up the exact same way as the windows deployment services vm just with four gigabytes instead of eight but the same four cores same uefi firmware and same q35 machine go ahead and open up the console and start this thing it should try to pixie boot at this point so start pixie over ipv4 and the next thing you should see is press enter to pixie there it is once a machine is booted up this screen should look pretty familiar now it is a little bit different from most windows installs as you actually need to log into the windows deployment server to actually take advantage of the service so go ahead and select your language and keyboard layout and click on next you should be met by a login dialog however this one you need to type in the full qualified username from your server so if you're on an active directory domain that will be a privileged active directory user with the full administrator at local.local whatever your domain name is in the case of a standalone server you need to type in the server name backslash administrator so for me my server name is wds dash homelab backslash administrator and then whatever your password happens to be once you log in you should be able to see the four image files that i've prepared to install so we're going to go ahead and install 2019 data center evaluation click on next we're going to format our hard drive and then click on next again and from this point out it runs just like a standard windows installation iso it installs windows reboots and takes you to the login screen now while that's going let's go ahead and get the windows retail disk loaded up into the image server so i'm gonna go ahead and close this vm and go back over to our wds server i'm going to go back to my isos and i'm going to open up the windows 20 h2 standard iso we'll be met with essentially the same exact directory structure so open up sources and then go down to install however this installation file is not a dot wim it's a esd now essentially an esd file is almost the exact same thing as a wim file however you can't just add an esd file into a windows deployment services server and let it install you have to actually extract wim files from the esd i guess some departments at microsoft just weren't talking to each other when this change was made even worse there's no gui interface to extract wim files you have to fire up the command prompt and run the deployment image servicing and management tool or dism because microsoft more than anything else loves their acronyms so first up we're going to copy the install esd to the same remote install directory and again so we don't lose track of this one we're going to rename this to windows 20 h2 standard once that has copied over i'm going to go back to the root of the c drive and create a new folder called wim next up we're going to do the trickiest bit of this whole install and that is opening up powershell to extract the wim files from the esd file first you're going to want to browse to the c remote install directory inside of powershell then we're going to type in dism space forward slash get dash whim info space forward slash wim file colon and then the name of your windows esd file so windows hyphen 20 h2 hyphen standard dot esd and if you typed that in successfully you should see a full list of the wim files that are inside of this esd so we've got windows 10 home windows education and windows pro today i'm just going to extract the windows 10 home and windows 10 professional because those are really the only two that i ever install onto client pcs to do that you're going to want to take note of the index number so for windows 10 home it is one and for windows 10 professional it is six now for the really fun part the command is d-i-s-m forward slash export dash image forward slash source image file colon windows dash 20 h2 dash standard dot esd space source index colon 1 for image number 1 for windows 10 home space destination image file colon c colon backslash wim backslash and the image name you would like to save this as so win10-20h2-home dot w i m space forward slash compress pull in max space forward slash check integrity and hit enter and if this comes up you typed in that command correctly if it doesn't come up spell check i take it back this is the part that takes the longest i'm gonna get more eggnog now obviously once you've extracted the windows home image you're going to want to do the same thing for the windows professional image or any other image files you need inside of that esd once those are done exporting we can go ahead and go back to our windows deployment services console we're going to right click on install images and add install image down here we're going to create another new install image group we're going to name this one windows 20 h2 click on next we're going to browse to that c colon slash wim folder and then in here you can see both the windows 10 home and windows 10 pro images i'm going to add the home image first go ahead and click on next now pretty much every version of windows that installs is just the windows 10 and then the sku so windows 10 home windows 10 education windows 10 home n whatever the case may be uh i do recommend changing the name so you can say what revision of windows 10 that you're using so uncheck the use default name and then we're going to change this from windows 10 home to windows 10 home 20 h2 and then click on next after just a minute or two it should finish up and now we can add our windows 10 pro image so instead of clicking on the install images this time i'm going to right click on the install group windows 20 h2 and click on add install image directly in there yet again we're going to browse to that cwim directory and this time i'm going to add the windows 10 pro image and we're going to do the same exact thing name this windows 10 pro 20 h2 click on next and then add the image when that's done go ahead and click on finish and you can go and close out of windows deployment services once you've added your image files to windows deployment services you can actually delete the wim files that you added to both the remote install and the c wim directory so go and delete both of those free up a little hard drive space the reason being is it actually copies them into two different locations so for your boot images if we open up the boot folder go down to x64 because we used a 64-bit installer and then we can go down to the images directory open that up and here you can find your windows server 2019 boot.wim likewise if you go to the images directory inside of remote install you can see both of our image install groups opening one of those up and you'll find a very large res.rwm file and then the four image files that you added however these image files have shrunk down to about three to six megabytes each the reason being is once wds adds an image to an image group the only thing it keeps track of is the differential between one mim file to the other so this is simply a differential between the four different versions of windows server 2019 that we added to wds that's also why i recommend not mixing windows revisions so don't mix a 1709 with an 1803 don't mix 1909 with 20 h2 because the differentials are going to be much much larger and you can actually lead to installation corruption now that all that is sorted let's go ahead and do a test install of windows 10 home back inside of proxmox you can see i've set up a brand new windows 10 virtual machine with the exact same settings as the other two so same as before let's go ahead and open this thing up and boot to network so yet again it should go to pixie boot and then you should get a message to say press enter to enter boot environment press enter for network boot service there we go now you might notice we didn't actually copy the windows 10 boot.wim file off of that iso the reason being is once you have a boot.wim file it's the same installer it's the same exact application and they work exactly the same and can install every version of windows that you add to wds so yet again we are going to log into the wds server so wds dash home lab backslash administrator and now you can see we have a grand total of six images to choose from we have all of our server 19 installs as well as our windows 10 home and windows 10 professional i'm going to click on windows 10 home and click on next we'll set up our drive real quick and get this thing installing moving back over to our server 2019 test installation if i open that up we are ready to get this thing up and running so i'm gonna set english as my language us has the keyboard layout we're going to accept the license terms and then set up a password and here we have a brand new installation of windows server 2019 data center evaluation we'll go and let windows 10 finish installing but that is pretty much the gist of windows deployment services this should get you off the ground with non-customized image files so at least you can install off of a network instead of having to create a new flash drive every time you need to create a new pc as i mentioned earlier in a future video i'm going to go over creating custom windows images including adding driver packages for each unique set of hardware that you're going to be installing on meaning you don't have to lift a finger once windows is actually installed we'll also go through removing some of the more obnoxious features out of windows 10 meaning that you never have to deal with them on a windows install ever again if you have any questions or things that you would like to see in the next video go ahead and let me know down in the comment section below and on your way down there make sure to drop this video a like and subscribe to craft computing if you haven't done so already follow me on twitter craft computing to keep up with my daily shenanigans and if you like the content you see on this channel and want to help support me in what i do consider joining either the patreon or float plane links are both down in the video description as a bonus you'll get exclusive access to my discord server where you can chat with myself and the other hosts from talking heads thank you all so much for watching this one and as always i will see you in the next video cheers guys you know this is mostly eggnog water at this point and it's still delicious [Music] today we went just a little bit cheaper for the drink but boy is this stuff good uh this is kirkland's eggnog wine cocktail a pre-alcoholized i guess is a word uh eggnog cocktail uh 13.9 percent and says it's made with real cream and serve over ice here we go oh my god that's good that's a dangerous one oh wow rich creamy nutmeg not overly boozy which is concerning because it's 13.9 percent um that's really good this is really good but like i said so so dangerous this drinks like eggnog i'd buy it safely like the non-alcoholic stuff i have to remind myself this is 13.9 percent it's quite strong but you don't taste it delicious though i i don't know what more to say it's it's eggnoggy it's got a lot of nutmeg to it there's a little bit of hint of orange in there which is just fantastic it's not overly boozy tasting and so it's very very smooth just about anyone whether you're an alcohol drinker or not will probably enjoy this one

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 169,295

Keywords: Windows Deployment Server, Windows Deployment Services, WSUS, MDT, Windows network install, windows imaging, Windows WIM, Windows ESD

Id: ARDjb2UV3Nw

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020