We can create custom installation images for our Windows servers to
be cloned and easily deployed many times over.
I want to install a custom image,
and I'm in a Windows 2022 server that has nothing configured on it at all.
It's not even activated, which is why you see the black screen.
We can't make a change unless we activate the license.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to install the application called PuTTY.
So that way we've customized this image,
and then I'm going to run an application that's going to generalize the image.
Generalizing the image allows us to create an image that can
then be copied and then customized for Windows deployment
services and then pushed out to new users.
A great example of this would be software needed for the accounting department,
the HR department, the IT department, they're all going to be different,
so we can install applications for all these different departments and
that way they'll only get the image that's right for them with
applications that have the right licensed software.
I've got my application installed on my server,
and I can confirm that by going to the Start button,
and there's my PuTTY application.
Next what I'm going to do is I'm going to install an application called
Sysprep. A captured file copies the custom image I create here and then I
copy it up to Windows Deployment Services for use by various job titles or
departments that all need different software.
Sysprep has launched, and what I want to do is choose the default out‑of‑box
experience, or OOBE as we sometimes call it, and choose Generalize. And then the
shutdown option, we want it to shut down when done.
So what this is going to do is it's going to create this
special configuration that's going to allow this to be used
for Windows Deployment Services.
If it has any special custom configurations other than installed applications,
many of these are going to be stripped out.
So it just has the applications installed with no computer name,
no IP address,
no other information, not even a license if you licensed the server,
all that's going to be stripped out so this particular image can
then be cloned. And when it's done doing all that,
it's going to shut down this particular server, and then we
can use that in Windows Deployment Services.
You definitely don't want to log into it after you've
generalized it, otherwise just by logging into it,
you're going to be creating a custom user folder that's going to
need to be stripped out and generalized again.
So once it's all done,
just go ahead and use Windows Deployment Services to
then configure that as a custom image.
Soon this image will be able to be used as a template for
creating custom Windows deployment images to be used in Windows Deployment Services.