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You need to have completed Part 1 and Part 2 before starting this part.



Create a new collection

In ConfigMgr right click on Collections and choose new collection



for collection name call it Deploy Windows Server 2008 and fill in the comments



for membership, click next and ok to the warning,





for advertisements and security click next also





click close once done and you should see your new empty collection listed.



Advertising the Task Sequence to a collection

Under the Computer Management node in SCCM ConfigMgr, right-click the collection we have just made (Deploy Windows Server 2008) and choose advertise task sequence



fill in the description Build Task Sequence, ..... the task sequence should then be selected by clicking on Browse,



select the Server Task Sequence we made earlier



select Make this task sequence available to both media and PXE



Alternatively, right click the task sequence itself and choose 'advertise' to get to this same step.

Schedule

Set your schedule depending on whether you are in a Lab or Production Environment.

For a Lab Environment

Make the Task Sequence mandatory by clicking on the yellow star and select As soon as possible.

Select ignore maintenance windows when runing program and allow system restart, set the program rerun behaviour to always rerun program so that we can rerun the task sequence over and over as we require for testing.



For a Production Environment

In a Production environment set the advertisement from Mandatory to Optional, this gives us less risk of an accidental deployment but also introduces the possibilty of choice.




if you want to remove choice then keep the advertisement mandatory but change the program rerun behaviour to never rerun (see below screenshot).





Distribution Points

set to Access content directly from a distribution point as we will be wiping the hard disc as our first task in the task sequence



Interaction

adjust interaction to suit your needs



Security

and security



review the summary and click next to proceed, then verify that all went well in the confirmation window.



at this point right clicking on our chosen collection and clicking on the Advertisements tab will list the Task Sequence we just added.





Add server to collection

Under Operating System Deployment, right click on Computer Association and choose import computer information,



select Import Single Computer (if you want to import multiple computers select using a file instead)



in the example below i'm just giving the server a name and using it's MAC address



click next to the data preview and then for Choose Target Collection, hit browse and select the collection we made above



click next until the wizard is complete

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Set the IP address as a variable

we are now going to define the IP address of the server, to do so, select the Collection we've just added it to and locate the computer, right click on it and choose properties and then click on the variables tab



click on the yellow star to define a new variable...

For a static IP address, we need to add the following variables:

Quote

OSDAdapterCount
OSDAdapter0EnableDHCP
OSDAdapter0IPAddressList
OSDAdapter0SubnetMask
OSDAdapter0Gateways
OSDAdapter0DNSServerList

You can get a full list of available variables here


here's a sample of values for the above variables

Quote

OSDAdapterCount = 1
OSDAdapter0EnableDHCP = false
OSDAdapter0IPAddressList = 192.168.0.20
OSDAdapter0Subnetmask = 255.255.255.0
OSDAdapter0Gateways = 192.168.0.30
OSDAdapter0DNSServerList = 192.168.0.10

so starting with the OSDAdapterCount variable, let's remove the checkmark from do not display this value and enter a value....



now we shall disable the ability to get an IP from a DHCP server



For the OSDAdapter0IPAddressList variable, enter the IP address



next we add the subnet



gateway



and DNS servers (keep in mind that the DNS ip address(s) must still allow contact back to our SCCM server or the Task Sequence will fail just after applying the network settings to the network card.



until our IP address variables look like this

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The Deployment

Ok we have now got everything in place to deploy the Windows Server 2008 machine, so boot it up and let PXE boot take over

Pxe booting the Server....






Windows PE starting..




Note: If PXE boot is not working as planned you may need to do some PXE troubleshooting.

customised LOGO in the background :-)



here it's starting the Task Sequence....



formatting and partitioning the hard disk...



Windows Server 2008 Setup starting...



copying and then expanding files.. (this takes a LONG time, especially if you are doing it virtually)



a restart followed by...



completing installation



then another reboot

and it starts the next part which is Installing the Configuration Manager client..



once that is installed, another reboot, then....initializing the Configuration Manager client followed by Install Roles and Features ...



and here we can see ADDS is being run, configured and setup, as will DNS, and more..



and finally the Windows Server 2008 login Screen



and once logged in, here it is, the end result (you have to reboot one more time to see the roles and features installed).



if you do an ipconfig /all at this point you'll see that our w2k8deploy server now has the ip address/subnet/gateway settings we specified earlier as variables, however it lists it's DNS settings as localhost instead of the ones we specified, why is this ? because if you setup a server to host it's own AD then it will as part of the AD setup define DNS to point to itself if it is the only DC in a Domain or forest, to test that, simply create a new Task Sequence and instead of making a new Domain Controller, just create a standard server with some feature added. The result will look like this (please note that in this screenshot that another Task Sequence has kicked in and that the server has only one Role installed, namely Windows Deployment Services).




If you appreciate the effort that went into helping you Deploy Windows Server 2008, then please Digg this.