Best Practice for Reference Images

[Kops]

Our organization recently bought some Lenovo X1 Yoga laptops and wanted them to be rolled out with Win10, so I've started to look at building Win10 images and have had tons of problems. I've worked through a bunch of them, but I'm having problems with the reference images.

 

I originally tried installing the OS on the laptop, booting into audit mode, running windows updates, created a couple local accounts, and capturing the image using SCCM's image capture media. If I deploy this via SCCM everything looks OK except the Folder Redirection/Offline Files GPO does not work properly (folders get redirected but no sync partnership is set up). I opened a call with Microsoft about it and am waiting to hear back on that.

 

In the meantime I decided to try to capture a reference image in VMware as I've seen some people suggest. What's strange is that if I build the reference image in VMware, the Group Policy issue disappears, but my task sequence starts failing out halfway through. I've looked at the SMSTS logs and see lots of driver errors but I'm not quite sure why as the drive pack works fine for images captured on physical machines. I've included the SMSTS files here in case someone can assist with that.

 

Can someone advise the best practice for building/capturing reference images? Should I use Build and Capture? Should I use MDT? Both seem to be much more complicated than what I've done in the past but I can spend time trying to go down these paths if its worth the time and effort.

smsts.log

smsts-20160817-134321.log

[anyweb]

for best practice you should use virtual machines to build your reference image on, most people recommend MDT for that job but you can do it in ConfigMgr also,

it's not recommended to capture an image from an already installed computer (such as your lenovo) as this will contain domain registry settings, changes, drivers and a multitude of things that can cause issues later,

 

so go virtual (hyperv is great) and build your reference image there, once captured, customise the deploy task sequence to use custom apply driver package steps for your different hardware models with wmi options for determining what hardware it is

[tregelen]

I haven't created a reference image in a while as I have been using the base install.wim from the ISO but when I did it was always made on virtual hardware for the reasons given. The reason I changed to the base wim was because all the changes could be done on the fly with PowerShell and if anything changed it could be a small script change without having to recapture a new image.