It’s only been just over three months since the initial
release of DeployR 1.0. Even so, we have
now released a new version with several new features:
- Support for creating standalone media. With this new capability, you can create USB
or ISO media that contains all the task sequences and content items that you
select. This can then be used to fully
deploy an OS without having to download any content from the DeployR server. You can optionally allow communication with
the DeployR server so that you can leverage additional DeployR features (e.g. offline
domain join, Autopilot registration, etc.) while still getting the task
sequence content from the media. See the
documentation for full details.
- Automatic
log uploading. Instead of asking the
technician to copy the DeployR log files to a place you can look at them, DeployR
will now automatically upload the log files at the end of each task sequence so
that you can easily review them from the DeployR server itself. And if you want to include your own log
files, just make sure they are in the DeployR client’s log folder (C:\_2P\Logs)
and we’ll grab those too.
- Import
driver packs from OEMs. We
previously could automatically download and inject the latest driver pack
directly from the OEMs during a task sequence or allow you to maintain driver
packs yourself that would automatically be downloaded and injected from the
DeployR server. Now you can combine the
two: fully control the driver pack versioning by importing the OEM’s driver
pack into DeployR server. DeployR 1.1
makes this easy for you to do without manually downloading and extracting the
drivers yourself.
- Configure
the keyboard layout in Windows PE. Since
some devices being deployed may use different keyboard layouts, we’ve added a
way for you to choose, or even to set the default to something other than US
English.
- Run
server-side scripts. Sometimes the
operations you want to perform during a task sequence are best done from a
server, rather than from a client. With
the new “Run server-side script” you can now execute a PowerShell script on the
DeployR server, passing it all the task sequence variables from the client. Whether you need to do additional tasks in
Active Directory, Entra ID, Intune, or other systems, this ensures that you can
perform these tasks securely without worrying about authentication from the client
PCs. See the
documentation for more info.
- Initial
support for Linux installations. DeployR
1.1 can now install Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 LTS and above, with a simple
unattended installation process using either a downloaded ISO or content from
an NFS share.
- Improved
download performance. Through
additional tuning of the DeployR web server, content downloads from the DeployR
server are now significantly faster than they were in DeployR 1.0.
See the
release notes for a full list of enhancements and changes. For those already running DeployR 1.0, the upgrade process is simple:
- Make sure you have the latest .NET 8 and PowerShell 7.4 releases installed (currently 8.0.25 and 7.4.14) on the DeployR server.
- Install the new DeployR 1.1 MSI.
- Completely regenerate your DeployR boot images so that they have all the updated components.
