System Imaging

System Imaging is the process by which you make an exact copy of one system onto another. For example, if you are in a large corporate environment, you may create one system image for your desktop which you then want to deploy to all of the systems you buy – ensuring continuity from one system to the next and saving time. Can you imagine how much time it would take to setup thousands of workstations, install an operating system, install all of the applications, and configure each system?

With system imaging, you setup one computer with the operating system, drives, applications, and configuration you want, save the image, and then you can deploy it multiple times.

There are several different types of systems which allow you to perform this imaging: the most popular are Ghost and Microsoft SMS.

Sysprep

Sysprep is a tool from Microsoft which prepares a system for imaging after it has been configured. Sysprep is required because Microsoft assigns a system ID (SID) to a computer when the OS is installed. This SID is used in a variety of security situations and needs to be different for each computer. If you were to just image a computer and apply it to thousands of new computers, each workstation would have the same SID which may cause problems in your network and on your domain. Sysprep prepares the computer to assign a new SID on bootup and does a variety of other configuration things to prepare the computer for imaging. Sysprep is free and available in the Microsoft deployment tools on the corporate Windows XP or Vista discs.