Joseph Hinkle at MyITForum.com

This session was presented by Norman Cillo and Wally Mead.

I've watch at least one Wally session every year since I've been coming to SMS. You do a great job, Wally. Keep it up!

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 just rolls off the tongue. Every presenter has had trouble with it.

1st key point: OSD is Microsoft's preferred way to deploy Vista.

If you're familiar with OSD, the first portion of the session is review. I'm not going to reiterate it here. If you need more in-depth info about OSD, there are lots of good resources out there.

On of the review points brings me back to one of OSD's shortcomings. OSD in SMS 2003 is not as robust in bare-metal deployment scenarios, particularly machine-to-machine migrations. I've been a part of a team that has migrated about 800 computers using OSD. The problem is coming up with a solid process that works on machines that we had no control over before we are ready to re-image. I'm looking forward to the enhancements in SCCM 2007. They should help, especially the built-in support for state transfer to a network location.

The feature pack update requires SMS 2003 SP2. The update is required to support Windows vista image capture and deployment. It won't be available until mid-2006, after Vista Beta 2 is available. Beta 2 will be supported for deployment. The original OSD feature pack does not support Vista.

It will support both WIM formats. The current version, 0.9, will still be compatible, but all new images will be 1.0, the Vista format. There will be no migration utility to convert an image to the new version.

One interesting statement that Norman made was that they recommend that baseline applications be installed on the master image. I personally believe the opposite. I want to update that image as little as possible, so we deploy everything after the fact. We have a lot of machines that don't need Office and the other apps that are typically required for a standard user. Since I want to maintain a single image for all hardware, our image is a flat install of Windows XP with all of our OS level customizations. I run an update process that installs all non-storage drivers and other company-specific updates as a part of the post-install phase.

Sysprep does not need to be pre-staged in Vista. It is "found automatically". It uses unattend XML files supplied somewhere else in the process. Vista has the capability of using a binding server. In that case, the product key does not need to be supplied as a part of the OSD package.

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