I run an engineering Development Lab with around 130 Servers in it ruuning
mostly Server 2003 flavors but also some Windows 2000 and we are just adding
Server 2008 to the mix as well. We have mostly Physical servers today and
have just recently begun making use of Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Virtual
Machine Manager. We plan to consolidate around 35 servers in the coming 2
months While expanding our server farm capacity by about the same number on
virtual hardware. To do a lot of this we use RIS, actually today we use
Windows Deployment Services (Legacy mode) to roll out our Server 2003
environments and support software.

I'm in the process of developing plans to integrate and migrate more Server
2008 machines. Part of our desire is to upgrade deployment capabilities onto
Server 2008 machines but we seem to have hit a roadblock or at least a large
pot hole. It appeard that the Windows Deployment role in Server 2008 only
supports Server 2008 and Vista deployments, legacy Windows 2003 is not
included. I understand the difference in the deployment models between the
two and need to find out if the Server 2003 deployment services can support
mixed mode deployment or if the lastest Windows Automated Install Kit can do
it. I would like to consolidate our deployment services on to as few machines
as can handle the load as possible and it simply does not make sense for us
to migrate out deployment system up to server 2008 early if we are hamstrung
by only partial support for our server deployments.

I've been looking for discussions and whitepapers on mixed mode deployment
support but found only docs that one or the other mode. Does anyone have any
advice, resources or links to docs etc on the subject?

Anything that gets the ball rolling would be ful.

Thanks,
Phil
CheckFree