From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

Operating system installation

From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

Operating system installation

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- There are multiple ways to install an operating system, although you'll need to decide which one best fits the needs of your organization. It certainly helps to have all of the facts. The easiest, most interactive, but slowest installation is the manual one, also called an attended installation. This is where you install a DVD into your DVD drive and run through the installation. You have to make individual choices on partition sizing, locations of files, networking, and other settings. This is true of any operating system. Each of these decisions are called an answer. An answer file is something used in an unattended installation. This file can be downloaded from Microsoft for Windows installations. You fill out things like the computer name, administrator account, networking, whether or not it should be joined to a domain, and more. Linux and Unix can also use answer files. A headless installation is one where you don't use a monitor; another device connects to it remotely and sets up the machine. This isn't a common way to install Windows, but it is possible. A network installation utilizes pre-execution environment, or PXC boot options you'll see when you boot into the setup mode. If you make this the default boot option, then it can automatically connect to a Windows Deployment server through the network and deploy the operating system with predetermined settings and pre-installed software. This is a common practice with larger organizations. There are also third-party products that can perform a network installation with various operating systems as needed. You can schedule a network installation or install it right away. This can be done on a formatted hard drive with no data on it or as on a drive that already has an OS, where it will all be deleted and formatted with a new OS. All of these installation types can be done on a physical computer or using a virtual machine that runs as a guest OS on a host computer. Windows comes pre-installed with Hyper-V for virtual machines at no cost, but you still need to purchase licenses for operating systems. Other products include VMware, VirtualBox, Xen, and more. They all work in a similar way. You can even host these virtual machines at Azure, Amazon Web Services, and other organizations. Operating system installation decisions can affect how much time you have available for customer support. Be sure to take the time to determine which is right for your organization.

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