We are experimenting with Citrix Provisioning Services to deploy servers in our environment, but it's been giving me a lot of problems. As I was cursing it for the umpteenth time it occurred to me that the feature I'm most interested in is the ability to discard changes on reboot.
Is there any other way to do this? I have heard of something called Windows Disk Protection but it doesn't seem to be be currently supported. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Graham
Windows Disk Protection is part of the old "Windows SteadyState" for XP (and the even older "Shared Computer Toolkit") and isn't something you're going to be able to use on modern versions of Windows.
There is the Enhanced Write Filter for Windows Embedded operating systems, but that's not going to run on Windows Server 2008 (and if you did get it to run it'd be entirely unsupported). You're looking at a twisty maze of licensing to get Windows Embedded running legally in your shop, I suspect.
"System Restore" might get you some of what you're looking for but I suspect you're going to have the best luck hosting the machines you want subject to this policy in a virtualization environment that provides this functionality at the hypervisor level. Non-persistent disk mode in the VMware hypervisors, for example, can do what you're looking for.
What about using restore points that is already a Windows feature?