I was invited to teach a class I wrote about Vista to the good folks at Dell, and so far it's been a very fun experience. A great group here, very passionate about the technology. The first day talks lots about installation and software deployment, and in one of the labs we set up some WinPE discs and created some WIM files from the students' machines. Then for deployment we set up Windows Deployment Services (WDS), which installs a copy of Vista over the network using a simple PXE boot. We had the luxury of configuring a sweet Dell server -- a PowerEdge 2800 -- right in the front of the room with Win2K3, DHCP, RIS, etc.
After snagging some WIM images with ImageX, we put them out on the WDS machine, but during the PXE boots we were getting this error:
PXE-E55 Proxy DHCP Service did not reply to request on port 4011
Found out that although we had chosen "Respond to all client computers" during the initial installation, for some reason the setting didn't stick, and the server actually ended up being configured with "Respond only to known client computers". With this setting it would have worked if we would have pre-staged the computer accounts by adding each machine's GUID to a new computer account in Active Directory, but anonymous connections would get no response. So if you run into that error message, the fix is to make sure the WDS server is configured for "Respond to all client computers".
Another note, if your DHCP server is missing option 60 in the scope (the option to give the name of the file that should be pulled from the TFTP server) then you'll get this fun error message:
PXE-E53 No boot filename received
After sorting everything out, WDS works pretty swell! Here's a screenshot of what it looks like when you deploy boot.wim found in the \sources folder of Vista:
Upon clicking "Next", you have to log onto the domain as shown, and can then install an image.
Another topic that came up during class was how to make a bootable USB key that holds the Vista DVD, or the installation media of other OSes. The CD Forum has lots of details. Of particular interest is the Bart PE program:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showforum=20
I'll have to get a picture of the front of the Round Rock 1 building before I go. It's where all the execs hang out, including Michael Dell. The front of it is dressed up really nicely with a big graphic about Vista!