SCCM - couple of things to clear up?

[gerardsweeney]

Hello, all..

 

We're making the move from Altiris DS6.9 to SCCM 2012, and I was hoping someone could clear up a couple of things?

 

 

In our current Altiris setup, we have our Main DS server which lives in the Data Centre, and each of our schools has a Package server which runs PXE and a simple file share for the OS/application installer files.

 

If we want to create an image for SchoolX, we just fire up a job and tell it to image to drive P: which the PXE boot disk knows to map to the local school server.

So pretty much no WAN traffic at all, and everything's peachy.

 

According to the consultant we have setting up SCCM (or, far more accurately, if I've understood him correctly), we need to create the image in the SCCM console and it saves it to the main SCCM server in the Data Centre, and THEN copies it back down to the school distribution server.

So if I create an image that's 20Gb once I lump on all of the common apps, that's 20Gb copied up the WAN only for it to then copy it straight back down to the very school it originated from. Which seems utterly mental.

Our High schools are on 100Mb pipes, so that's about 90 minutes. Our Primary Schools are only on 10Mb, so I'm pretty much going to be waiting a day before the image is available.

Or is there some other way around it? I don't care one iota if it's not the recommended supported super official Microsoft way of doing it, so feel free to advise on scripts etc etc

 

Next question.

If I create a scripted application installer that's 5Gb in size, and distribute it to SchoolX.

Then realise I need to tweak a config file inside it, apparently SCCM requires that the whole 5Gb gets piped back out to SchoolX.

Is that right, or is there some way around it?

 

Part of me is thinking if it is, then my applications are going to be BAT files pointing to the installers hosted on the file share in the school

 

Final question.

How reliable is PXE on SCCM?

 

I ask because the PXE on DS6.9 is pretty ropey, but we have it pretty much well documented how to reinstall it on the site servers, if need be.

Is reinstalling PXE on the DP servers a common event?

 

Any thoughts gratefully received.

 

Cheers,

Gerard

[synaesthesia]

PXE is faultless on SCCM when set up correctly, it's never missed a beat here except for human error.

Don't image with all the common apps - put in a couple of little ones if you like (i.e. vlc, paint.net) but leave everything else to SCCM. The whole idea is when you change something you only need to change that one thing and not the whole image. The image shouldn't be much more than 6GB for win7/8/10. Then you can replace the image without worrying about the little apps with it. We're running the same image we have done for 2 years - it's something that shouldn't need touching often, if at all!

[BlakeP]

I came across a few blogs yesterday while looking into another certificate issue. One option is to simply leave the Trusted Root Certificate Authority setting blank. SCCM Then just assumes the Trusted Root certs are correct on the clients.

[free780]

Sccm uses a single instance storage mechanism. So he content lib should be clever enough to distribute changes to an image not the whole thing. You can also enable dedup on the drive with the content lib to save space. I have a 10 Mbps site and never had any issues. You can throttle the speed during the working day. Once you've got an image on it distribution doesn't take long as most of the blocks of data are already present. Best practice is to have a image with windows and office. Flash,java, vlc, adobe etc update to frequently. Use application deployment for those.

[gerardsweeney]

Thanks for confirming that.

I was having nightmarish visions of umpteen Gb install folders getting redistributed because I change a single ini file

 

My plan is to have the non-routinely updated applications in the image - that's pretty much how we roll with our current Altiris setup.