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Deployment scenarios
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the dawn of the “Windows as a Service“ era requires a
change in the deployment rhythm to which you’ve probably grown accustomed.
Traditionally, you’ve had two Windows deployment options:
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The “wipe and load” scenario starts with a standard image, built to work with company-owned
hardware and apps. Using deployment tools, you completely replace the existing image on a
new PC (or one that needs to be reimaged for support reasons or as part of the reassignment
process to a new employee).
In-place upgrades have historically been shunned by IT pros, who can usually recite horror
stories of failed upgrades. Beginning with Windows 8, however, the upgrade process was
completely redesigned to make it fast and extremely reliable, with easy rollback capabilities
for the rare instances in which something goes wrong.
Windows 10 adds a third deployment option with the ability to create provisioning packages
that can transform an existing image on a new PC. This option is still in its early stages but has great
potential for future deployments.
Through the years, many IT pros responsible for large Windows-based networks have settled
on the wipe-and-load option as the default solution for new operating-system deployments. That
option works fine for every-three-year deployments and for occasionally provisioning new devices.
It’s also a perfectly reasonable way to make the transition from your current Windows 7 or Windows
8.1 base to Windows 10, especially if you’re introducing new apps as part of the operating-system
upgrade.
But that option isn’t cost-effective when the operating system is receiving multiple upgrades per
year. Building new images every four to six months and managing data migration and application
reinstallation for multiple enterprisewide deployments every year isn’t necessary.
In the “Windows as a Service“ era, the far more reasonable alternative is the in-place upgrade.
That’s exactly what Microsoft did when deploying Windows 10 to its tens of thousands of employees
worldwide. The corporate deployment effort used the Operating System Deployment (OSD) feature
in System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager SP1 to offer automated in-place upgrades to users
running Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.
Microsoft’s deployment offered two options. Users were allowed to initiate the upgrade from the
Software Center at a time that was convenient to them. Figure 4-1 shows how this user-initiated (“pull”)
option works.
50 CHAPTER 4 Deploying Windows 10 in the Enterprise