Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Service Architecture

The Windows Deployment Services architecture has three major categories of features:

• Management features Management features are a set of tools that you use to manage the server, operating system images, and client computer accounts. The Windows Deployment Services MMC snap-in is a management feature, and the command-line interface is another.
• Server features Server features include a PXE server for network booting a client to load and install an operating system. Server features also include a shared folder and image repository that contains boot images, installation images, a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server, a multicast server, a driver provisioning server, and files that you need specifically for network boot.
• Client features Client features include a graphical user interface (GUI) that runs within Windows PE and communicates with the server features to select and install an operating system image.

Figure below illustrates the various features of Windows Deployment Services. The following sections describe the image store, PXE server, management, and client features in more detail.

Image Store

Figure below describes how Windows Deployment Services organizes the image store.

Organizing images into groups, as shown in above, provides two benefits. First, image groups allow you to better manage and organize images. For example, you can manage the security of an entire image group rather than managing the security of individual images. Second, image groups provide units of single instancing. This means that all the images within an image group use Single Instance Storage (SIS) to significantly compress their contents. The file Res.rwm contains all of the file resources for the image group, and this file uses SIS. Each image file contains only metadata that describes the image file contents based on the contents of Res.rwm.

Windows Deployment Services references images by their group name and image file name. For example, the image ImageGroup1\Install2.wim refers to the image file Install2.wim in the group ImageGroup1.