SCCM OS Deployment

anything I don't mind · 30 Jan 2013 at 14:47

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?

anything I don't mind · 30 Jan 2013 at 16:37

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.

anything I don't mind · 31 Jan 2013 at 12:02

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 · 31 Jan 2013 at 15:44

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.

anything I don't mind · 31 Jan 2013 at 16:28

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 · 31 Jan 2013 at 17:03

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.

anything I don't mind · 2 Feb 2013 at 12:40

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.

anything I don't mind · 4 Feb 2013 at 15:37

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.

anything I don't mind · 4 Feb 2013 at 15:52

yea sccm osd is slow at every point. This is after making the capture image and setting up sccm. This process will need to be completed nearly every time you make a mistake or need to tweak the wim or the task sequence.

Capturing the image to USB (30mins)
uploading the image to the sccm server (20mins)
adding the image and distribute to dp (30mins)
create task sequence and distribute packages to dp (30 mins)
1) create the offline boot media (1 hour) = 25 mins image process
2) boot from pxeboot over gigabit network (5min) = 1 hour image process

This is when you know how to work it all.