Chris Mosby at myITforum.com

I went to two awesome sessions on the OSD feature pack yesterday.  One was by Wally Mead, and another by Johan Arwidmark, a Microsoft MVP in Setup/Deployment.

While my partner-in-crime, Jeremy, and I learned essential information in the use of the OSD Feature Pack that will make us super-heroes back at the office, I did want to make one comment about what we learned.

I was really surprised to learn that a lot of the little problems (some bigger than others) that we have been experiencing were actually issues and\or intentional(?) behavior in the OSD Feature Pack. 

Now I admit that we pushed through our issues without seeking out to much outside help from Microsoft or the community, mainly out of a deep seeded need to figure things out on my own. However, I feel that some of the things that some the issues that we were having should have been disclosed to the community and with emphasis, especially since Microsoft now says that the OSD is the PREFERED way to deploy Vista.  If this was done and I missed it, then that is my fault. Meanwhile we thought we were doing something wrong,

Two of the issues that I can remember this early in the morning are the following:

1. If you have a server image that requires specific storage drivers that have to be required on your Image Install CD, then you will have problems using that install CD if you try to use it to install an image on a workstation install that does not need those same drivers.  This is because the image install process will try to force the use of the storage drivers if you include them on the CD. In our case, that means having a seperate CDs for workstations and server installs. This might not sound like a big deal, but it is if you are in the middle of trying to get OSD running for a major deployment.
2. This is the biggest one to me.  Apparently while loading up the image capture or install process, network access functionality doesn't always load up before the wizard to start off the process is loaded. To make sure that this does happen, you have to do some hacking in the background.  You have no idea how many hours we wasted on that issue!!

OK now that I have vented about this, you should all know that documentation on some of the sessions will be available here soon.  Be on the look out for anything that has been written by Johan Arwidmark, the Jedi Master of OSD and ZTI as far as I am concerned.

 UPDATE: Looks like the guide that I saw has already been published on MyITforum.com, download it here: http://myitforum.com/articles/8/view.asp?id=8856