SCCM OS Deployment

[anything I don't mind]

I have been sent up to Bristol for a few days to make a windows 7 image for a client, they want to use sccm 2007. Building the image is easy as i have done it before, but the sccm side of things is terrible imo. Just one problem after another.

I have captured the image at this point and i am just uploading the 12gb wim file to the sccm server so i can add the image.

I found a good guide or two on technet which made it a lot easier. But simple things like copying the default profile from admin profile and similar is not available and i have to injected an xml during deployment in order to fix this. I looked in to creating a usb media because they don't want to do pxeboot just yet. I found a guide and to my non surprise microsoft added some annoying brick wall in the way to make my life a misery. Can't use usb hard drives and the usb thumb drive cant be more than 32gb and it has to be ntfs partition but apparently the wizard reformats it in to fat32 and it fails. Typical microsoft bs imo.

So at this point it is going to take me longer to deal with sccm than build the image itself. If i was using sysprep and clonezilla i could have finished already and deployment is 5mins compared to 1hour.

is 12gb wim too large or is that normal? I think it might have captured the hp recovery partition?
Has anyone successfully made usb deployment image from SCCM?

 

[Skidilliplop]

Not that this really helps much but - I use sysprep and clonezilla

 

[glenimp617]

a 12gb image is far too big

I've been using SCCM 2007/2012 for the past two years and it's very good once you understand it

The initial build should ideally have been done on a virtual machine. Delete all the partitions and install windows to a single partition. Make sure you even go as far at getting rid of the bitlocker partition windows 7 automatically creates during installation.

Do all the updates, delete any restore points, delete the update cache folder. Install office, update, snapshot VM and then do the office pre-arm command. Quite basic stuff for an initial wim build.

Capture the WIM then sort out your task sequence. You need to deploy the task sequence to a collection even if you are booting from a CD/USB over PXE. If not, the task sequence will fail.

Query your machines WMI to get the model name and create a driver package which has a WMI query against it. That way only those models will pick up that driver package.

oh, almost forgot. Make sure you use the 32bit boot WIM and enable the F8 command prompt. That way when you boot the machine up, hit F8 and do an IPCONFIG. If you haven't got an IP it means the boot WIM doesn't have a compatible NIC driver. You need to inject one.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Ok it has included the recovery partitions in the wim but in the task sequence i decide to only deploy the system image to the c: drive. So will give that a try.

I just ran in to that problem about 10 mins ago. Because there is an old sms pxe server it wouldn't pxe boot. So i created the cd boot media from the boot image, but came up with no nic interface. Now i am adding drivers to the image and recreate the cd.

SCCM 0/10 imo.

 

[paradigm]

Might not need to inject drivers, I found that sometimes I had to manually start the NIC service.

wpeutil initializenetwork

 

[anything I don't mind]

It worked after adding drivers.

I have re done the capture after removing the recovery partitions and the wim is now down to 6gb. But omg is sccm deployment slow. It defaults to slow format as well, silly. I set it to fast format, that helped. But now applying the image looks like it is going to take 1 hour or something silly.

Especially when you are in testing stage, because most likely i will have to redeploy this and then have to modify a few things on the task sequence and redeploy, ever time taking this long. painful.

I only have today and tomorrow to finish this. But considering i only had 3 half days in total to configure sccm and build an image, can't realy expect a miracle. At least i got the sccm side of things working.

But thanks for your input on the wim file size.

I left the 100mbyte partition for bit locker etc. And what it does is download the wim, 25mins, then it applies the 100mbyte image, then it redownloads the wim for another 25mins, then it applies the image. I see why now you suggested removing all partitions...

 

[anything I don't mind]

omg i hate sccm more than before i even used it.

It is completely useless. I have made the image after wasting my time for a few days but now as i used the copyprofile option which worked ok but whenever i log in with a new user it just makes a temp profile and doesn't create the local profile.

This is so poorly designed. They could have easily made a nice deployment software but they chose to be lazy and make a poor design and rip people off. i hate MS.

 

[Ev0]

SCCM used to be a large part of a previous role, and I never bothered using it for image deployment as it was far much more of a ball ache than doing it through Ghost.

It has it's place and is useful in certain scenarios, but we had the same hardware types for each desktop and laptop so didn't have that to contend with.

But for our situation it just wasn't worth the effort, I really like SCCM for most things but OS deployment wasn't one of them.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Well I am glad it is not just me thinking that SCCM osd is terrible

Unfortunately it is not my choice. I would have used my normal method of clonezilla and sysprep and be done already. But they want to use sccm.

 

[anything I don't mind]

phew turned out it was not the image or sccm fault. It was the roaming profile field on AD that was causing the temp profile issue. Almost lost it when i had to potentially redo the entire image from scratch.

Ok i panicked a bit.

 

[glenimp617]

Just wondering if anyone has been on the course and passed the exam?

I too thought SCCM was a pile of dog ****. Then I worked with a team pros sent through BT Engage. Went on the course and past the exam.

It's VERY complicated and VERY powerful but once mastered it's something else

 

[Ev0]

Just wondering if anyone has been on the course and passed the exam?

Yes and yes. It was my bread and butter for a number of years (first with SMS 2003 then SCCM 2007) before I moved out of that area.

Have been a contractor and permy in this area and worked alongside some of the specialists such as 1E.

 

[n30_mkii]

TBH SCCM is an excellent product, yes it has it's pitfalls but when you get it right and get used to the 'whole' product it's very very powerful. Over the last few years I've been working with SCCM2007R3 and now moving to 2012SP1. It takes time to get the setup right but when you do your efforts are rewarded 10 fold.

If all you are trying to do is deploy a baisc WIM this product is overkill. If you want to use the whole tool set its worth the effort. We now have it linked into SCSM and also use SCOM. Adding in orchestration later this year which adds yet another level. May even look into VMM and go the full hog.

And in answer to the other question, yes I have been on the course for 2007 and 2012. Not bothered with the exam as my CV is already cluttered enough

 

[mrbios]

Just going to plonk this here: http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/forum/44-sms-2003-sccm-2007-sccm-2012/

No better place than that for SCCM problems, personally only using it for windows updates and enpoint protection though so can't help with your issue. As good as the OS and app deployment is, it's too time consuming to get going when WDS works so well for us.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I worked out all the problems in the end. I am going to recapture next week and incorporate some fixes in to the build, instead of using post login scripts from gp. A great example of MS lack of effort in design in with regards to practical deployment scenarios. When saving the offline media task sequence for osd, the usb option does not work if you have a wim over 4gb, which is fat32 limit. Because sccm always reformats it in to fat32. The work around is to use the 8.5gb iso method below it. But that does not work because strangely it still splits the wim file to below 4gb and then it generates a file error on the wim file. I wonder if they ever tried to use the software before they released it because these are big issues. the work around is to use the 8.5gb iso and then replace the wim file with the original wim file that was added to the osd. then copy the contents to a usb. On the first go to make sure it was bootable i used the rufus usb software and then afterwards if i make changes to the task sequence just create another 8.5gb iso and then copy over the changed files and leave the wim on there. Using this method i can deploy an image in 20 mins and it only takes about 20-30 mins to make the usb boot media, but could be quicker if using faster pc and network.

I find the process of updating the distributions points a bit tedious and the task sequence editor could have had more options specific to deployment. Like a copy profile option and a dialog for options on naming the computer.

 

[n30_mkii]

Would be worth looking at integrating the MDT 2012 components into SCCM if you haven't already. Will give you some additional and useful additions to TS's and also UDI's

 

[Deleted member 77746]

If the systems are the same just clone one and then put the image onto another system and change serial. The system has the serial key and the serial belongs to the system not the media you image clone.

 

[Ev0]

If the systems are the same just clone one and then put the image onto another system and change serial. The system has the serial key and the serial belongs to the system not the media you image clone.

You can't really compare an image deployment system to manually cloning a machine when it comes to workplace systems, unless you only ever have one machine to do.

Generally you'll setup a system like this to do imaging en masse, remotely and with ease (once setup ).

My small setup using ghost used to do a few hundred at a time and could do it all from sitting at my desk.

Plus you've got all the post image stuff you may want to do.

Personally I use to keep the image as light as possible (usually just Windows patched up to the date I took the image and Office) with anything else being added on post image. Had a very neat little way of doing this nicely.

Meant that if you had a component that needed updating like Flash you didn't have to go and redo your image every time, just updating the post build installer meant new builds got the updated software.

 

[Django x2]

IME, SCCM 2012 is a work of art. A far cry from all previous versions. It's intense and a mega steep learning curve, but the rewards, and it's capability for ME orgs is excellent.

Great guides available at WindowsN00b if you need it.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I could do a base image with less software in it but that would add on time to the imaging process. Which could be up to 40min-1 hour and many reboots, after the 30-1hour imaging process that means we could have to wait like 2h hours to do an image, which imo defeats the purpose of imaging. I might as well just use the oem or even a reference wim and not bother capturing. Some of the software is annoying to install as well, sometimes it can be tricky to get it all to work together with manual install, might not be worth the hassle doing it with packages. Even in saying that there is still various department specific software that will be deployed post image using software packages.

After i have done the image if i need to update anything then I can just apply an update package and don't need to worry about people being on different builds. This is also a problem when doing tech support trouble shooting. If some people installed an image and had 8.5 sp1 installed of X software then a year later they had 8.5 sp2 updated. but new people had 8.5 sp2 installed without the prior version and we start to see problems then it adds to complexity of troubleshooting issues.

In ideal world with well written software this would not be a problem. but when you have about 5 addons in outlook and similar and software has to be installed in a specific order with many config tweaks, manual file copies etc it is just so much easier to do in the image. If i ever had to rebuild the image, which i shouldn't once it is built, unless a new os. Then I could always reload the clonezilla image and make the changes and then re-sysprep.