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KACE KBOX 2000 Series by Bob Kelly |
Page 2 of 5 |
Unattended Installations
|
To obtain media for installations, the KBOX 2000 series prompts you to feed it physical CDs which it uses to create a library of ISO images from which you may select when creating jobs for unattended installations. The process is simple and fairly quick, but if (like me) you have a library of ISO images yourself, you’ll need to burn them to CD for use by the KBOX as there is currently no mechanism in place to upload ISO images of your own.
The KBOX 2000 series does
not support Vista yet, but this support is expected to release some time
during the first half of 2007. KBOX 2000 currently provides support for
the unattended installation of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003
Server. |
If
you have one already, an unattended installation file may be used or you
may go through a very simple web wizard to create one of your own. To
keep things quick and easy, there are many unattended options missing
from the wizard. In the end, you are presented with the resulting
unattend.txt file and may edit it right in the display (so if you know
what you want, you are not really limited from taking full advantage of
all that is possible with an unattended installation). If there is room
for improvement here, it would be to offer an optional “advanced wizard”
to walk you through more of the options possible and to base the choices
provided on the version of Windows with which you are working.
 The
KBOX 2000 series makes quick work of unattended installations, which are
often the preferred mechanism for Windows rollouts when there is a mixed
base of desktop hardware in the organization. This is because the
unattended installation process has no HAL dependencies and, as long as
the drivers are present, it can handle most any hardware configuration
you may face. |
Application Deployment
When I hear the term application "slipstreaming" I think of a process whereby
the files and registry entries are merged into that of the target-- in this case
Windows. While I have not seen a product capable of that (at least not prior to
Vista), the KBOX 2000 Series is not far off: the setups are actually merged into
your target Windows distribution, where they are then called upon following
installation. As you can see by the image here, this is a fairly integrated
process.
You can instruct your unattended installation to automatically log on a
specified number of times, which means this entire process can be truly
unattended. The KBOX is simply taking advantage of automation features provided
by Windows, but it does so in a very intuitive way which (particularly for those
not savvy with the unattended process) is invaluable to taking full advantage of
these capabilities.
To get applications installed as part of your unattended deployment of Windows, you need only specify a file, it's command line installation parameters and with which unattended installations you want it included. When you add a new application install from the web console, the file specified is uploaded, placed in the necessary folder structure and the command line is added to the unattended installation of Windows. At this time you must specify a file to be uploaded, but I’m told this will be updated in the future for those cases where you wish to run an existing command and have no associated file you want to copy.
In a very clever move, the KBOX
2000 Series includes support for zip files so that you can have one file to
upload for an installation that may require many files and folders. You still
need only identify the command line for the installation as the KBOX will handle
decompression. When you use a zip file in this way, the installation process will
decompress and change to the directory automatically for execution of your specified
command line.
