I am researching a new workstation deployment strategy for my company. As it stands right now we are building every workstation by hand and this takes massive amounts of time. The step that takes absolutely the longest is Windows Updates.
I currently have setup a Windows Deployment Server for testing and I have tried the following two methods to try to create a .wim that contains the latest windows updates.
Method 1:
I built a workstation from scratch and installed all of the necessary applications and made sure it was fully up to date. I then booted the reference workstation with Windows PE and captured an image of the workstation using the wdscapture.exe tool.
I then did a test deployment to a target workstation and it successfully installed. The only issue though is that none of the updates from the reference workstation seem to carry over. When I check Windows Updates on the target workstation it said I have over 100 updates.
While I realize this method is not hardware agnostic I am OK with managing a .wim file for each model workstation that belongs to our company. This is irrelevant though because Windows Updates seem to not be captured.
Method 2:
I attempted to follow this guide to inject the Windows Update packages directly in the generic install.wim that comes on the Windows 7 DVD.
I then deployed this install.wim to my target workstation but I still have around 60 updates when I check Windows Updates. However the update packages that the wsusoffline tool downloads are included in the capture. So it seems to me that wsusoffline tool is not downloading all of the windows updates that are available.
Problem:
How can I deploy/capture a .wim with the latest Windows Updates included? Is this even possible?
It's definitely possible. I'm not sure why you were unable to capture the updates. Our image creation process is done on virtual machines as WDS / MDT images are hardware independent (drivers injected on the fly etc). Create a hyper-v server and build your base images on that, then use Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)'s image capture task sequence and it should capture updates. I think it would be much easier if you integrated MDT with your WDS server. MDT helps automated image building and provides great logging for all that is occurring.
Also if you use MDT, you can add a task sequence to your build task that runs windows updates during the OS install. All automated. If you need help with MDT watch all parts of this guy's youtube series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV_BgBXp47k&list=UUW9K5NBLKkxEK0kKMSTbgGQ&index=5&feature=plcp