Deploying Windows 7 by Using Windows AIK

Another aspect of corporate systems administration is ability to deploy anything and everything at once without even leaving your chair. In Windows world, we had that ability from Windows 2000 and it evolves with every new version of operating system.

One of the key tools to install the operating system itself is Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK). Windows is using so called “answer file” to not ask you for things with known answers. And it’s not only serial number, user and computer name, but also partitions, drivers and other things that could take hours to install and configure otherwise.

As a potential scenario of deployment, imagine that you’ve just received a 100 new computers from hardware vendor. 100 brand new machines with no operating system installed, as you will use Windows 7 corporate – version which you can’t buy at local store. Your task is to install it as soon as possible – it’s Friday evening and you don’t want to waste your weekend on it.

So you prepare the image of one machine and deploy it on all other machines using local network. Very simple thing to do when you know what you are doing.

The following walkthrough lab is from the Microsoft Official Curriculum 6294A: Planning and Managing Windows 7 Desktop Deployments and Environments. It shows you how to create bootable media with image of your reference workstation and deploy it on other machines. Enjoy!