How long are your imaging times?

[h4x0r]

Good day everyone,

Let me provide some background...I work for a school district, and we use CM for imaging, software deployment, endpoint security, reporting, etc...fairly standard in my book.  In a recent session with some other districts, another tech mentioned that they were able to image a workstation in 4 minutes using their FOG server (FOG is a free imaging tool, runs on Linux...look it up if you are curious).

Now, there are a lot of factors that could come into play there...network congestion, SSD vs SATA drive, etc...but part of me is sitting here going, there's no way that they have booted, downloaded an image, applied image, and gone through all the "first boot" setup, and be ready to login in 4 minutes.  Obviously I have my own idea of what it means to image a workstation...for me it is the process start to finish, with the workstation ready to go at the login prompt.  If we're talking about the time it takes to simply download the WIM file, then that's something else.

So I'm curious...based on what I just said (start to finish, all software installed, and ready to login), how long does it take you to image a workstation with ConfigMgr?  Please let me know if you use SSD's in your workstations or not.

Thanks!

[Rocket Man]

SATA - max 30-35 mins - vanilla image with updates - all basic software packages including Office Pro - some business configurations\apps - NO updates -

SSD - 20-25 mins

4 mins ready for logon does sound somewhat unbelievable to lay down a full OS to a system - even if it was a fat image - it probably takes that to apply the OS to disk - again depends on HW and network infra to HW

[h4x0r]

Thanks Rocket Man...I agree that 4min seems ludicrous...I'm sure there are things we could do to better optimize our OSD...but there's no way I could bring it down to that.  Do you mind if I shoot you a PM with a couple other questions?

[tregelen]

Where I am it depends on which OS is being deployed as we have gone through a number of different architects (basically each OS was done by someone else and never really looked at after that) and they all had different approaches.

Windows 7 takes 90-100 minutes with all apps and updates

Windows 8.1 takes 75-80 minutes with apps and updates

Windows 10 takes 30-35 minutes all apps and updates

We have all SSDs so no idea what it takes on SATA but 4 minutes is kinda crazy.

[h4x0r]

Thanks Tregelen...you mention different approaches...do you mean thick vs thin images being deployed?

[tregelen]

Kind of but I would call the Windows 7 image ultra-thick.

The Windows 7 image is a single WIM that has x64 and x86 with a number of applications installed making the total size over 15GB. No matter what image you are wanting to deploy it has to download the entire WIM to only use half of it. Then after that it actually uninstalls a number of the applications that were installed in the WIM and installs updated versions via packages not the application model, hence increasing the deployment time. This is because for some reason whenever we service or try to recapture that WIM it breaks and you can no longer deploy Windows 7. It's in kind of a 'its being retired anyway, lets not waste time' thing as we only image maybe 1-2 machines a week with that OS.

Windows 8.1 is a lot lighter, only having x64 and some applications coming in at 6GB

Windows 10 (the one I created) being the thinnest of them all at 3GB which only has the OS, no applications. That then has the applications dynamically installed via a frontend form that I wrote so that it can be customised at time of imaging without having to recapture WIMs all the time. That is regularly serviced with OS patches through the SCCM console

I did look into FOG and it looks interesting. I passed it along to a colleague who does PC repairs at his home and he is going to set it up for that (he uses MDT atm) so we will see what kind of speeds he gets from that.

[Rocket Man]

PM surely h4x0r