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Multicast OS Deployments With WDS |
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Friday, 31 August 2007
by Michel Roth
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I think there's to kinds of Microsoft products: the ones that suck bigtime at version 1.0 (MOM 2000 anyone?) and those that are pretty decent for a version 1.0, RIS is one of the latter category as far as I'm concerned.
However... RIS is a really nice product that, with some minor adjustment, does really well up to the larger SMB environments. I think RIS was succeeded by ADS which now is going to be succeeded by WDS (Windows Deployment Services) in Windows Server 2008. I never stopped liking RIS, but it missed one critical feature: Multicast. RIS did not have that which made bigtime deployments s l o w . But, rejoice, today I learned (via Bink.nu) that WDS will support Multicast. Combined with the imaging technologies (WIM images) incooperated into WDS this should speed things up nicely.
As Kevin Sullivan puts it: " The new Windows Deployment Services (WDS) will now support an enhanced multicast feature which will allow you to multicast out your Windows OS's from Windows Server 2008, right out of the box". Great "news" as far as I'm concerned. Another reason to look forward to Windows Server 2008.
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