nLite - Windows Installation Customizer

Last week at the TSX in Nice I had an interview with Richard Gartsthagen. He was very enthusiastic about at tool called nLite. With this tool you can remove Windows components like the Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Messenger and more….. When your are creating a template for your virtual machines, you don’t want a modem driver or a sound card driver. In fact the only drivers you are using within a virtual machine are the one’s within the VMwaretools. After the removal of all the overhead from your Windows  ISO the virtual machine becomes very small and Windows will start faster than ever before. Its even possible to slipstream the virtual machine drivers into you ISO and get rid of the press F6 message for  the LSI driver during the setup of your Windows XP virtual machine. Richard has build an ISO image for the VDI labs with a size of 72 Mb. After the ISO is installed you have a Windows XP virtual machine witch starts up in seconds and the size of the hard disk is only 500 Mb with still 200 Mb free disk space. This is the first step in creating a JeOS (pronounced "Juice") witch is an abbreviation of Just Enough Operating System. This technique lets you create and ship your software within are ready to run virtual machine. You can get a free copy of nLite at http://www.nliteos.com/.