New Features of Windows Deployment Services in Windows Server 2008 R2

The Windows Deployment Services role in Windows Server 2008 R2 has been improved with the following new features:

• Dynamic driver provisioning You can now use Windows Deployment Services to add driver packages to boot images so you can deploy these packages to client computers during deployment. For more information on dynamic driver provisioning, see the section titled "Managing and Deploying Driver Packages" later in this tutorial.
• Improved multicasting Windows Deployment Services can now automatically disconnect slow clients and divide transmissions into multiple streams based on client speeds. Windows Deployment Services also now includes support for IPv6 multicasting. For more information, see the section titled "Creating Multicast Transmissions" later in this tutorial.
• Native booting to VHD images In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you can now use a VHD as a running operating system without any other parent operating system, virtual machine, or hypervisor. For example, you can deploy a Windows 7 .wim file to a VHD and then copy the .vhd file to client computers. After you do this, the Windows 7 boot manager must be configured to boot directly into the VHD. Note, however, that if you simply deploy Windows 7 into a VHD, you'll go through the Sysprep specialize pass, which prevents you from using the VHD on physical machines. The workaround for this is to first use the Wim2vhd tool available from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd, create a VHD, and then use ImageX to apply the contents of the WIM into the VHD.
  VHD images are not intended to replace WIM images for general deployment purposes. Furthermore, beginning with Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Deployment Services now supports deploying VHD images in addition to deploying WIM images. Specifically, when you deploy a VHD through Windows Deployment Services, the Bootmgr entries are automatically fixed, so there is no extra step. For example, you can use Windows Deployment Services to deploy VHD images during an unattended installation. For more information on native booting to VHD images, see "Understanding Virtual Hard Disks with Native Boot" in the Windows Client TechCenter on Microsoft TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd799282.aspx. For more information on deploying VHD images using Windows Deployment Services, see "Deploying Virtual Hard Disk Images" in the Windows Server TechCenter on Microsoft TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd363560.aspx.
• PXE provider for Transport Server Windows Deployment Services now includes a PXE provider for the Transport Server role service. This lets you use a stand-alone Transport Server to boot from the network or to multicast data without the need of AD DS or Domain Name System (DNS).
• Additional EFI support Windows Deployment Services now supports network booting of x64-based computers that use EFI.

More Info For additional information concerning these new features, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd735188.aspx.