Windows Deployment Services Deprecation#

On September 21, 2026, Microsoft announced Windows Deployment Services (WDS) will be deprecated in the next Windows server release¹.

This is the next step in Microsoft’s push to the cloud with Intune and Windows Autopilot.

I tried Autopilot to do provisioning for Microsoft Surface tablets. I hated it. It was gross, slow, and clunky.

Microsoft already made life difficult when they removed vbscript from Windows PE despite it being a core dependency for Microsoft Deployment toolkit. After that, I started looking at alternative deployment methods.

Alternative - autounattend.xml#

Assuming Microsoft does not deprecate answer files for Windows setup, an AMAZING tool exists to make autounattend.xml file generation a breeze!

A huge thank you to Christoph Schneegans for releasing https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator

Windows installation is as simple as creating a Windows thumb drive (you can also PXE boot), dropping the autounattend.xml file on the drive along with any desired installer/driver files, and booting off the drive.

Christoph also provides a wonderful usage guide that shows how to easily install drivers with the $WinPEDriver$ folder (among other things) and a great list of sample scripts to get WinGet working and other packages installed.

I have donated to the development of this tool both personally and in my professional role.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the web interface is not open source. So it is NOT recommended to enter sensitive credentials unless they will be rotated (LAPS, etc.). You can of course use dummy credentials and then change them in the generated XML file afterwards.

I suggest putting the autounattend.xml file in a git repo and versioning it to make future changes simple.