Wednesday, December 2, 2015

WDS - Injecting VMware VMXNET3 Driver Error


I'm creating a new WDS + MDT infrastructure almost from scratch and I'm using VMware for deployment and image creation.
Because I'm using VMware VMXNET3 for network and VMware ParaVirtual SCSI for storage I needed to inject this 2 drivers on my Windows Deployment Servers (WDS) boot image for installing the created images.

Doing this on MDT when creating the boot images for the litetouch deployment has no issue, but for the boot.wim for installing images (extracted for the sources\boot.wim of Windows DVD) something goes wrong.
For some unknown although the VMware ParaVirtual driver gets easily inject, the VMXNET3 driver don't.
Not really investigated the reason, but has a workaround, follow this easy steps.

So what we're going to do it's to inject the drivers on boot.wim file using DISM:
  1. First copy the file from a DVD/ISO (it's located on "...\sources\boot.wim") and copy it to a local drive (ex.: D:\Temp\)

  2. Than you'll need to mount the WIM file:
    DISM /Mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\Temp\boot.wim /Index:2 /MountDir:D:\Temp\MountPoint

  3. Now, you're ready to inject the VMware VMXNET3 Driver (or any other drivers), you just need to point to the *.inf file:
    DISM /Image:D:\Temp\MountPoint /Add-Driver /Driver:D:\Temp\Drivers\VMwareVMXNET3\vmxnet3ndis6.inf

  4. Drivers injected, now unmount and commit changes:
    DISM /Unmount-Image /MountDir:D:\Temp\MountPoint /Commit

And you're done!
Now you just need to publish that boot.wim on your WDS and deploy images.

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