Systems Deployment

Two key pieces of information you left out....
1. What operating system are using talking about? XP and Win7 are two very different beasts.
2. What are you using to deploy your OS? Are you using SCCM/SMS, MDT, DVDs? Altiris, or so on and so forth...?

Typically the deployment methodology will largely impact everything you do. And with most of them you build a driver repository so that the drivers are not built into the image file.

Yes I current use ghost solution suite 11.5 My plan is to build a thin image with all the base applications that I KNOW is on every machine in house. We have maybe 10-15 types of hardware in house. The 37+ images is basically because of different software needs. How I plan to rectify this is to script the installs of the unique software applications after the thin image has been laid down with ghost.

Currently we do not have a software deployment solution in house, it is my job to currently asses what is out there and recommend the best and most efficient solution to the bean counters, while meeting our needs. I have heard that Microsoft SCCM is the way to go for delvering softwareto clients after the universal base image has been laid down. I have not heard of Altiris NS but I assume it does the same thing as Microsoft SCCM? What is the difference between SCCM and SMS?

I plan to make a universal image using sysprep and the same method you have used "aka the drivers folder" to make a thin universal image and script the unique installs and settings needed after the fact. The OS we will be deploying is going to be mainly Windows 7 with a sprinkling of XP here and there.

Regarding the building the image on a virtual machine, some people say yay and some say nay, I guess I have to find out if it works for me in the long run.

Thanks for your reply and hopefully you can answer some mpre of my questions in this post.

SMS 2003 was the previous version of SCCM 2007. So same stuff, just LOTS of improvements in SCCM

If you shift to SCCM I'd strongly recommend creating a Build and Capture task sequence to be run from a virtual machine - to be used to capture your image. And also being employed by a large university, I'd suggest trying to focus on where you want to go instead of nailing down existing processes. For example, no sense in getting XP all tightened up with Ghost if you're going to shift to something like SCCM and Windows 7. Focus on the future :)

If you're doing Ghost, in the past what I used to do was install all the apps we'd need, and then capture the huge image. Then, when we deployed the image I had a VBScript that ran and uninstalled apps that weren't supposed to go on a particular machine (it's usually easier to script a removal than an install on some niche apps).

Hopefully that answered some of your questions (if not, let us know and I'm sure someone will chime in)...

I did all of this in June 2010 and it is a lot to tackle. Though we use a Universal Imaging Tool (UIU) from Binary Research (http://www.uiu4you.com/). This tool allows us to create a hardware independent image and will tackle all of the drivers that you can manually enter in Sysprep. If people have had success with Windows 7 Deployment Tools I be interested in that, but due to the time constraints I didn't want to have to worry about this piece. We then used WPKG to be our free deployment tool for third party packages and are customizing scripts. Our hope to one day have all packages deployed through this mechanism. So far it has worked really well and is scalable/customizable to your environment. Oh, and WPKG is free. We also use WSUS for all Microsoft Updates. Part of this as well included the end-user only having User rights on the workstation instead of Admin rights. We needed a way to push out updates and packages so the end-user doesn't have to. Feel free to ask me any questions, hope this helps!