ADS Architecture

The Automated Deployment Services (ADS) provides administrative interfaces, services, a database, and agents.

Administrative interfaces. Administrators work with ADS via the command line, a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) window, or scripts. All of these interfaces work with the underlying services via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

Automated Deployment Services. The main ADS service is the controller service, which manages and coordinates the installation process. The controller provides information to other services and maintains information about the server being deployed, such as the sequence of deployment tasks associated with a server. It can manage servers individually, or servers can be grouped into sets and each set handled as a single entity. The Network Boot Service interacts with Pre-execution Environment (PXE) support on the server to boot the computer, download a virtual floppy image (if needed for preinstallation tasks such as updating the PC’s BIOS), and download the Deployment agent. The Image Distribution Service manages the OS images.