Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Image Operations

It's all about the image. Well, not really, but the image is still a key component of deploying Windows and thus part of the critical path in any OSD project. The next sections provide a simple, step-by-step process for creating, maintaining, and deploying a Windows image.

Image Creation

As of RTM, you still have to recapture an installation of Windows to a custom image to avoid it from being deployed to the D: drive. This is a known "issue" and annoyance and (hopefully) slated to be fixed in a future version or service pack of ConfigMgr 2012. When it is fixed, you can directly use the core image that is included with the Windows installation media: image.wim. This in combination with the offline update installation capabilities of ConfigMgr 2012 (discussed in the "Offline Software Updates" section) should greatly simplify basic Windows deployment projects.

Even with the ability to directly deploy image.wim, there is still value in tailoring the image to include updates, applications, and customizations (for a complete discussion of this, see the "Image Maintenance" section later in this tutorial). At a minimum, including the latest Windows updates is highly recommended.

Unless using the offline update functionality, you must have a reference system available to deploy Windows to during image creation. In general, the best choice for this reference system is a virtual machine. Since OSD is designed to be hardware agnostic, when you create an image, it should be as generic as possible. Virtual machines are the ultimate generic hardware and thus perfectly suited. In addition, virtual machines are easy to reproduce when needed, do not take any desk space, are relatively cheap, and remotely accessible at a (virtual) hardware level. Any of the major virtual machine software solutions (except Microsoft/Windows Virtual PC) is ideally suited for this task, including

• Microsoft Hyper-V
• VMware ESX or Workstation
• Oracle VirtualBox

Oracle VirtualBox is freely available for both corporate and personal use so is a popular choice by many. Along with VMware Workstation, many desktop administrators prefer it because they do not have to ask for server-hosted virtual machines. Windows 8 is planned to include Hyper-V and should become quickly popular for this task.

Automatic Image Creation

Automatic image creation is highly recommended. It involves creating a Build and Capture task sequence and some upfront work. When created, though, it is fully automated, repeatable, self-documenting, and resistant to human error, making all future image maintenance tasks relatively trivial.

Here are several possible negatives to automatic image creation:

• Task sequences run as Local System. On rare occasions, poorly written software installers do not deal well with the peculiarities of this account. There are workarounds including recapturing the software or using the alternate credentials functionality of the Run Command Line task. Other times, legacy applications require hands-on installation or configuration. This is difficult or impossible to perform during a task sequence, as the task sequence was not designed with user interactivity in mind. The solution is to automate the installation and configuration of this application with scripting or other automation techniques.
• Every detail must be automated. In general, this is good because it makes these details easily repeatable. This may be difficult for some to achieve though because they do not have the scripting or Windows automation background to accomplish this. In these cases, enlist the help of someone who does have the background or check the Internet. It may take a little discovery and trial and error to automate a particular task, but it is well worth the effort.

To begin your automatic image creation, first create a Build and Capture task sequence:

1. In the Software Library workspace, select Overview → Operating Systems → Task Sequence . Choose Create Task Sequence from the ribbon bar or right-click context menu to launch the Create Task Sequence Wizard.
2. Select Build and capture a reference operating system image.
3. The remaining significant pages in the wizard define how to build a reference system from scratch and then capture:
   • Task Sequence Information: On this page, you define the Task sequence name and Description and set which boot image to use.
   • Install Windows: Choose the OS Installer to use, enter a product key (not required if deploying Windows 7 and using a KMS), and enable or disable the local Administrator account; if enabled, you must also specify a password. For Build and Capture task sequences, you should also specify a password, so you can access the reference system to troubleshoot it if the deployment fails.
   • Configure Network: Specify the workgroup or domain to join on this page along with the user account to use to join the domain. For Build and Capture task sequences, do not join a domain and simply supply a workgroup name such as BUILD.
   • Install Configuration Manager client: Choose the built-in ConfigMgr client agent installation package and add any additional installation properties. For Build and Capture task sequences, adding the SMSMP= property is highly recommended because the system is not joined to the domain and therefore cannot locate the MP using AD.
   • Include Updates: Choose whether to include updates in the reference system image. For updates to be considered, they must be deployed to the same collection targeted by this task sequence's deployment.
   • Install Applications: Select applications to add to the reference image.
   • System Preparation: For Windows 7 task sequences, this page has no options; for Windows XP task sequences, choose a previously created package containing the appropriate Sysprep files. This Sysprep package is a basic package created under the Application Management → Packages node in the Software Library workspace. The source files for the package should contain the entire, extracted contents of the deploy.cab for the appropriate version of Windows being captured-no programs are needed.
   • Image Properties: Enter some basic metadata that is added to the captured image on this page.
   • Capture Image: On this page, enter the complete UNC path, including filename of the WIM file to which to capture the reference image. Also, provide an account that has permissions to write to this path. This account requires no special permissions except Write permissions to the path specified. Using the Network Access account for this task is a popular choice as you should use a low-privilege account.

The information entered during the wizard populates the various tasks required for a Build and Capture task sequence. See the "Task Sequences" section for explicit descriptions of these tasks.

Complete the wizard to create your final Build and Capture task sequence. From there, deploy the task sequence to a collection containing your reference system. Deploying to the All Unknown Computers collection is often used for Build and Capture task sequences because it is similar to the new computer scenario. Just make sure that you disable this deployment after creating your reference image so that users do not accidentally choose it. In addition, if you use a system (or VM) that currently has a resource in ConfigMgr, you must first delete the resource from ConfigMgr to make it unknown again, as described in the "Unknown Computers" section.

You can now run your Build and Capture task sequence as often as necessary to update or refresh the reference image. After creating it, import the WIM file containing the reference image into ConfigMgr using the steps outlined in the "Operating System Images" section. To use this image, see the "Image Deployment" section.