Automate packing and unpacking OS to and from an image?

Question

Automation

Good day!
The situation is this. Several operating systems are used on employees' PCs:
1. Windows XP x86.
2. Windows Vista x86.
3. Windows 7 x86.
4. Windows 7 x86_64.
A certain set of software is used, which is installed on each machine:
1. Firefox.
2. CD Burner XP.
3. K-lite Codec Pack.
4, etc.
Periodically, it becomes necessary to deploy all this economy on a new PC, which takes a lot of time.
Task: create an image of all used OS with a set of drivers and installed software.
Note: The entire set of software is stored in one directory on a server that is accessible via LAN and is constantly updated.
I would like to automate everything so that system administrators pay a minimum of attention to the whole process. And this means that manually rolling the image into a virtual machine, manually updating the entire set of software and manually packing the OS back into the image is not suitable.
It is necessary to automate WITHOUT human intervention (like this):
1. An image is downloaded, for example, from a local ftp server.
2. Deployed in a virtual machine.
3. System updates are being rolled.
4. The entire set of software is updated from the server.
5. Everything is packed back into the image.
6. The image is put back on ftp.
How can all this economy be done, given that you can spend the time of a system administrator only at the beginning of the journey, preparing the first image of the OS?
ps: the option to make an image, and then, when installing on a PC, run the system and software update scripts, is not suitable, because will take a lot of time.

Answer 1

Use Clonezilla .

Answer 2

sysprep. It is already built into 7-ku, EMNIP. Sisprep, then any means of transferring images (acronis, for example)

Answer 3

If at all without human intervention, I'm not sure that there are ready-made tools. But you can look towards Sstem Center:
1) Using SCCM, create a task on Deploy+InstallSoftware+Sysprep+SaveToLibrary;
2) Using SCOM, you can create an Alert to change the files of the software installed on the machine;
3) With the help of SC Orchestrator, by Alert from SCOM, we initiate a task for SCCM from point 1.
Accordingly, we deploy the deployment in the manner formed by the SCCM task using PXE / WDS.
Perhaps you will also need SCVMM somewhere in between ...
If all this is not there, then only write scripts. The only thing I don’t understand in your situation is that if the company is small, it’s faster to do it without automation than to debug the whole process. If the company is large, is there really not enough resources to allocate a person who would simply update the image? If the company is very large, you should already know everything that I wrote.