Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is a really interesting tool from Microsoft for network-based installation (deployment) of Windows operating systems. In windows server 2003 it was called Remote Installation Services (RIS). The purpose of WDS is to remotely deploy the Windows operating systems. See how to setup the WDS role.
WDS also allows you to deploy the operating system through a network installation. That’s the most important feature of WDS. One of the advantages of using the Windows deployment server is that WDS can work with Windows image (.wim) files. Windows image files could be created through the use of the Windows Sysprep utility.
WDSUTIL is a command-line utility to manage your Windows Deployment Services server. The location of the executable is windows\system32\wdsutil. Run the command prompt as administrator and run the below wdsutil commands to manage WDS.
– On how to configure WDS, see the article https://techdirectarchive.com/2020/05/12/configuration-of-windows-deployment-services-wds/
Below are some wdsutil command line options.
| Command | Description |
| /add | Adds images and devices to the WDS server |
| /remove | Removes images from the server |
| /start | Starts WDS services |
| /stop | Stops WDS services |
| /new | Creates new capture images or discover images |
| /get | Gets information from images, image groups, WDS servers, and WDS devices |
| /set | Sets information in images, image groups, WDS servers, and WDS devices |
| /update | Uses a known good resource to update a server resource |
| /delete-autoadddevices | Deletes records from the Auto-Add database |
| /reject-autoadddevices | Rejects Auto-Add devices |
| /approve-autoadddevices | Approves Auto-Add devices |
| /enable | Enables WDS services |
| /disable | Disables WDS services |
| /copy-image | Copies images from the image store |
| /export-image | Exports to WIM files images contained within the image store |
| /convert-ripimage | Converts Remote Installation Preparation (RIPrep) images to WIM images |
| /initialize-server | Initializes the configuration of the WDS server |
| /uninitialize-server | Undo any changes made during the initialization of the WDS server |
For an example on how to use the WDSUTIL is a command-line utility, see the following links below.
– https://techdirectarchive.com/2020/05/26/windows-deployment-services-how-to-add-images-to-wds-via-the-gui-and-wdsutil/
wdsutil /add-imagegroup /imagegroup:Windows2019_x64I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.