FOG/PXE/W10 unattended install and boot
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Hello!
I’ve just finished setting up my FOG server, but I’ve realised that I don’t really know how to proceed.
My situation is the following: I have to set up around 100 render nodes with the same hardware, which will be running windows 10 and a package of software. I have one of those nodes set up manually (From which I can grab the image?) and I’d like to make the process as unattended as possible. Ideally, I’d plug all the nodes in the network, turn them on and they’d grab the image from the FOG server and install it without any input from my side.
Can anyone help me with links to guides/resources to make it possible?
Thanks in advance for any kind of input on this!
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@marco_c I just want to make sure I understand here, because it sounds like you might have a different idea in mind than what FOG was intended to be used for.
Are you trying to create some type of netboot solution for windows. The power on, boot, reimage machine solution sounds a bit like netbooting because on the next boot your system would be wiped and a new OS loaded. I just want to make sure I understand your use case here.
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@george1421 Thanks for your reply!
I’m not sure that what I need to do could be achieved via net booting. At the moment each one of our render nodes has its own disk with windows and the software it needs on it (Essentially I’ve set up 5 of them manually so that the artists can start sending them the render jobs through Deadline.)
My idea was to use FOG to skip the manual setup of the OS & software on each node, and then just use the other systems in our infrastructure to control them.
If i sound confused it’s because I’m just the IT intern here and I have no supervisor to refer to hahah, sorry!
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@marco_c OK so lets backup a step here then.
Do you want to reimage the computer on every reboot or only when YOU decide to reimage the computer? The intent behind the process is very different.
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@george1421 Second case. The reimage should be happening only when I decide so
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@marco_c said in FOG/PXE/W10 unattended install and boot:
The reimage should be happening only when I decide
OK good then ignore the netboot stuff I said. You are using FOG as its typically used.
So the first part is you need to prepare the windows golden image for imaging. This means you should not connect the golden image to your active directory before capturing. You should not turn on bitlocker or secure boot before image capture. You should not install applications that are GUID based (like enterprise versions of antivirus) and you should sysprep the golden image and have sysprep power off the target computer. Then capture with FOG and deploy to the target hardware. As the windows computer boots up for the first time it will run through windows WinSetup/OOBE. At the end of WinSetup and before the first login screen is displayed Winsetup will run the setupcomplete.cmd batch file. This is where you would us the unattended command line options to install any GUID based applications.
Now when the computer reboots for the first time as I mentioned it will run WinSetup/OOBE if you don’t want to answer all of those microsoft startup questions you should create an unattend.xml (answer file) to answer those questions for you. You can also have the unattend.xml file set the computer name and connect the computer to AD. Drivers are another issue, but if you are using the same hardware on your campus that makes things a bit easier since once you load the drivers on your golden image they will be present on all deployed systems.
If you want to read up a bit more on windows imaging search for “windows 10 lite zero unattended touch deployment” There is a web site that helped me quite a bit setting things up many years ago https://www.deploymentresearch.com/ and https://www.itninja.com/
I’m sorry to say that Cloning the image with FOG is the easiest part of your journey. Its getting your golden image setup correctly that will take the most time. But I do have to say the more effort you put into perfecting your golden image the easier time you will have post deployment.
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@george1421 Thank you so much for all the infos! I will give it a try, this might save me many many hours
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@marco_c said in FOG/PXE/W10 unattended install and boot:
this might save me many many hours
It will take hours to setup on the front end, but if you have 100 nodes to create it will surely help you on the back end making all of the nodes exactly alike.
The actual deployment times we are seeing with FOG is under a 4 minute push of the captured image 25GB image, and about 12 minutes of windows OOBE normal unattended setup. So in about 15 minutes we can go from bare metal to ready for user.
Understand that it took us a week to perfect our first golden image back in 2015. But we’ve automated that process now with MDT to build the golden image and then FOG to deploy it.
There are many great tutorials on the internet that explains the Windows unattended deployment process (this is outside of what imaging tool you use).
