WIM Imaging Format.

I have started development of an interim Vista Enterprise Image. In doing so I have been using the WIM Imaging Format. In case you don't know Microsoft is using this as their format for storing Images. As opposed to Ghost or RDeploy, the WIM format is a file-based Image. Also you can store multiple Images in one file. But the best feature of all is that redundant files are automatically removed. All the images will only reference one file. So if I have several images all containing notepad.exe then it is only kept once.

So how well does it work. We create Images once per quarter and some off cycle releases as well. Mostly new apps, drivers and hotfixes, the usual. So right now we have 7 Images. All with Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003. Those 7 Images equate to 20.4 GB of data stored on our Image Station. After putting all those images into a WIM file we have one file that is 3.8 GB. I was shocked to see such an improvement. I wrote a VBScript that would parse out the XML produced by ImageX and map an Image to a name of the Image in the WIM file. After that I burned a DVD with WinPE on it. So now I have 1 DVD with all the Images released in the last year. Very, very cool.