The community rules state:

• "Someone else has relevant content and you want to help them share it with the world. It's a nice thought, but do not copy other people's content to the Wiki, even if the owner said it was OK."

The community rules state:

• "Someone else has relevant content and you want to help them share it with the world. It's a nice thought, but do not copy other people's content to the Wiki, even if the owner said it was OK."

Imagine you are using one of the third-party cloning solutions on the market. They are using sector-based disk images. Every one of those images, maybe 10 GB in size or more, will be stored on a shared folder and replicated on the WAN to various branch offices. That is a lot of wasted disk space and bandwidth. Microsoft uses file-based WIM files for imaging. This allows WDS to do some clever Single-Instance Storage (SIS) optimization and is made possible using image groups.

Image groups can be used for single-instance storage. The idea is that you use them to group together very similar installation images. For example, you may have a number of Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 installation images. Some have a copy of Microsoft Visio installed. Some have a copy of Microsoft Project installed. And others have a line-of-business application installed. Most of the files in those images are actually the same: they are Windows operating system files and the rest of standard desktop image. The image group will store those duplicated files just once. You may have one file that is 10 GB or more and the rest will be quite small. This optimization will save considerable disk space and will save bandwidth if you replicate the image to other WDS servers in the organization.

There are some guidelines for using image groups. The images that are contained should be based one very similar operating systems. Here are some group recommendations:

Versions --> There should be one image group for every version of Windows. This means you would have unique image groups for Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Service Packs --> A release of a service pack is a change of the operating system build and binaries. For example, there would be unique image groups for Windows 7 RTM and Windows 7 with Service Pack 1.

Architecture --> 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems have different binaries. This means you would need different image groups for Windows 7 x86 and Windows 7 x64.

You can create an image group by right-clicking on Install Images in the navigation pane and selecting Add Image Group..., as you can see in the following figure:

Make sure you use a name that is very descriptive of the contained installation image. Look at the following figure:

Note: You can also create an image group when adding a new installation image to your WDS server.