RIS or WDS or MDT? advise needed

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Hi all,

I need your advise.

situation: we have about 10-15 different hardware configurations for our workstations (different brands and different hardware, varying between p4 2.0 GHz to c2d systems). Mostly Windows XP, some Windows 2000 clients. Until now we installed the systems manually and created ghost images and duplicated those. Problem was that the images became outdated, hardware configs changed, etc.
So I would like to start using something like RIS or WDS, and combine this with post installation scripts to install common software packages, OS settings, et cetera.

I have read a lot of articles about RIS, WDS and WDT and now I am completely confused Which solution works best for me?
WDT sounds beautiful, with all the support for managing your images... but is it also useful when having to support different hardware configs? Or do I have to create a seperate image for each hardware config?

Ideally it looks like this:
- a few master images.
- Client is installed with latest, correct drivers.
- Afterwards post installation scripts install common software and OS settings.
- Windows updates and done by means of wsus.
- Last but not least: once it is running, little time needed to maintain/manage this.

Please advise what to use.

 

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anybody? Any insights or tips are welcome!

 

[58sniper]

RIS was replaced by WDS a while back, so I wouldn't even look at that.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[segil]

Ok, you say to use WDS, since RIS is old. Has WDS the same possibilities to install on different hardware platforms, as RIS? My idea was that RIS can install on any kind of hardware config, as long as the required drivers are available.
My understanding (which might be wrong) of WDS is that you create a baseline image and deploy it to computers. This image is already setup for a specific hardware config. Changing that afterwards feels less stable to me.

Am I over looking something here?