Many of you have probably already considered installing the 64 bit version of Windows 7 if not done already. I just found a “must read” article on the Deployment Guys blog about the WAIK and creating unattends for x32 and x64 images.  Click here to read the entire article.

In this video Jeremy Chapman senior product manager from the Microsoft enterprise product management team talks about booting from VHD as well as some of the new imaging features.

By the way, note that when booting Windows 7 from a VHD file you cannot use Windows Bitlocker or the Advanced Power Management features. Hibernation mode is also not supported.

The Boot from VHD in Win7 video is published here.

Additional information around native VHD support in Windows 7 can be found in this blog post.

Those looking at Windows 7 deployment read the “Windows 7 Deployment Changes” article on the Windows System Deployment Blog.

Today I’ve tested the WIM2VHD script provided by Mike Kolitz a Software Design Engineer from the Hyper-V Team at Microsoft.

In short, the script allows you to create a bootable VHD file directly from Windows 7 installation media, so you don’t need to go through the whole Windows Installation process. Once the VHD is completed, you can move it directly into your Hyper-V System and boot the operating system.

Detailed information about the script can found on the MSDN Code Gallery – Windows(R) Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) Converter.
Note that you must have the Windows 7 AIK installed to run this script. The script provides a lot of optional command line options, the shortest with using all default settings is as following:

cscript wim2vhd.wsf /wim:d:\sources\install.wim /sku:ULTIMATE

If you don’t feel like trying it out yourself but want to see how things are working, watch the video below.

When it comes to OS deployment the size of the image to some extend does matter. Windows by default comes with a large set of plug and play device drivers that are included within the operating system installation sources.

Prestaged drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 are located under C:\Windows\system32\Driverstore.

If you run the following command against your mounted Windows 7 image file, you get a list of all PnPdrivers included within the Driverstore.

Dism /image:c:\mount /Get-Drivers /all

Now getting back to the image size. Looking at how we could eventually save image size space, I took a closer look at the Windows 7 Driverstore folder size, that on an installed system uses 624 MB. So that looked like a potential candidate to reduce image size.

As mentioned above 624 MB is what the Driverstore uses on an installed system, but how much does it consume within an image, taking into account that there the content is compressed.

Running the following command creates a separate WIM (image) file with just Driverstore content included.

Imagex /capture c:\temp\driverstore\ c:\temp\win7drv.wim “win7driverstore”

The result is that 624 MB Driverstore content now just uses 219 MB. If we add the /compress max option to the above Command brings the size even down to 197 MB. 

Conclusion: Beside the fact that officially the default driver store cannot be modified anyway (if I am wrong here let me know), I think that carrying those +- 220 MB don’t make much of a difference.

Today I have been looking into the new “Profiling” options for Windows PE 3.0. Using the profiling options allow you to reduce the content of Windows PE to an absolute minimum without removing any boot critical content.

I am not going to re-write a step by step process here, as it is all described within the Windows PE User Guide for Windows 7 but here are the basic things

1. First build your PE boot.wim the way you have been doing it so far, but before unmounting it run the following command as well: dism /image:C:\PE\mount /Enable-profiling
   
2. Then boot your PE and start doing all the things you will need in the future as well. Just a hint, if you intend to run the ipconfig command, you must run it now, otherwise it won’t be there anymore when you apply the profile.
3. Once you have launched all commands and done whatever you want to do, run the following command: wpeutil saveprofile e:\Optimize_Profile.txt “Image Optimization Profile”
   
   (drive e: is a connected USB stick so that you can copy away the profile file, you will need it later).  
4. Finally rebuild your PE boot.wim, with the command  dism /image:C:\PEHD\mount /Apply-Profiles:c:\optimize_profile.txt and then commit the changes.  Note that you do not need to run dism …../Enable Profiling again here.

The results:

• The first boot.wim was 128 MB in size, a nearly standard boot.wim with some packages added.
• The optimized boot.wim was 62 MB in size.

Happy PE shrinking !

Great article i just finished reading about automating virtual machine host deployment on Hyper-V.

Download the complete Technet Magazine January 2009 edition here. When having trouble reading the CHM file, read this.

The below video is from Technet where Gordon Ryan explains how to use multicast transmission to deploy multiple clients.

Learn more about Windows 7, watch the Walkthroughs.

Windows 7 Walkthrough – AppLocker
Windows 7 Walkthrough - User State Migration Tool
Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows 7 Beta)
Windows 7 Walkthrough - Problem Steps Recorder
Windows 7 Walkthrough - Deployment Image Servicing and Management
Windows 7 Walkthrough – Enterprise Application Compatibility
Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7

Bitlocker is the build-in disc encryption solution that was first shipped with Windows Vista. The deployment of Bitlocker with Windows Vista wasn’t a straight forward process both in deployment and configuration. Reading and watching the current content that is provided around Windows 7 it looks that we can expect a number of improvements for Bitlocker.

• Bitlocker now also supports encryption of removable media,
• Additional Group Policy settings to manage Bitlocker
• No upfront drive preparation needed anymore (this is a great improvement as it simplifies deployment)
• Manage BDE is now a commandline tool (in Vista it was a script)
• Allows encryption of one or multiple partitions (no requirement anymore to have the OS partition encrypted)

 For more details watch the video below where Shalu Gupta MS Program Manager talks about the new Bitlocker in Windows 7.

Additionally you can download / view  the Windows 7 Walkthrough: BitLocker and BitLocker to Go

I’ve just found a typo in the Windows PE 3.0 Users guide.

dism /image:C:\winpe_x86\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows OPK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_OCs\winpe-wmi.cab”

dism /image:C:\winpe_x86\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_OCs\winpe-wmi.cab”

“OPK” should be replaced with “AIK” otherwise if you copy paste the sample commandline adding an optinonal component will not work.