You can
use WDS to perform ???bare metal??? installs (installations on computers without an
operating system installed already) of base Windows operating systems without your
being physically present or having access to the physical installation media. Instead,
the system uses a combination of a pre-boot execution environment (PXE) and a Trivial
File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) Server to boot the system from the network and load
the operating system. This service provides an in-box solution that makes it easier for
you to deploy Windows Server and Workstation operating systems throughout your
organization.
WDS uses images created in Windows Imaging Format (WIM), a file-based imaging
format unlike traditional disk imaging solutions that are sector-based. The advantage of
WIM is that it is not hardware-dependent since the smallest unit within a WIM image is
a file. In the WIM format, files are stored only once, even if they are referenced multiple
times in the file tree. In other words, it leverages a single instance store. This makes the
image smaller, and it is made even smaller since higher compression can be achieved on
the files themselves. This image format is used by Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment)
2.0. Windows PE can be considered the replacement for MS-DOS as the boot environment
for testing, installing, and deploying Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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