| Welcome > Getting Started with Automated Deployment Services |
Automated Deployment Services overview
You can use Windows Server 2003, Automated Deployment Services (ADS) to remotely and automatically deploy
ADS reduces the number and complexity of the steps required to deploy and configure a server via task sequencing. The processes required to deploy and configure a server have been captured by a set of scripts or tasks that are easily extensible by the data center to follow their business and technical processes. Placing the configuration steps within scripts makes it easy to automatically perform the deployment or configuration of a server or group of servers based on external events (such as the arrival of a customer order, or the need to bring additional servers online because the existing servers are overloaded).
ADS enables you to use a single server, called a "Controller," to perform large scale server administration in your data center. The Controller, together with the all of the other ADS services, enables you to deploy operating system images onto bare metal servers or to repurpose existing devices with new operating system images. In the data-center environment, you can use ADS to:
- Mount an image as a file and edit the image.
- Remotely purpose a device that has no operating system to a useful state or repurpose a device from one state to another state.
- Run extensible and configurable operations, such as scripts, on one or more systems from a single administration point.
- Leverage the ADS WMI Object Model to build custom applications.
The following topics discuss the ADS feature set and requirements in more detail: