SCCM Windows 10 image missing drivers issue

[speall]

Hi,

We are currently looking at deploying windows 10 education 1610 across our corporate network (we are a college). The gold image has been created and successfully deployed to machines however we are finding that there are some drivers missing from the machines on completion.

I know that drivers can be added into SCCM as packages to be used in the deployments but since we dont run on a standard model of machine this can become a bit of a laborious process. 

We noted that when you install a standard version of windows in a non corporate environment, windows will try to find drivers for unknown devices via windows update. Obviously updates within the network are controlled by SCCM but what we want to be in a situation where a machine is imaged and then windows update searches for any missing drivers.

We have updated the configuration of the updates within SCCM to include updates for windows 10 and servicing to hopefully enable this (see the below images).

I think really we need to know if what we want to do is actually possible within the scope of SCCM or if we are going to have to stick to the classic method of creating and importing numerous driver packages each time we add new hardware to our network.

Any advice from the experts would be most useful!

Thanks,

Simon

 

[simulacra75]

Any topics i have read on this up to now have suggested not to include drivers in the WSUS update catalog. The reason been, that it causes a lot of bloat in the WSUS DB. I'd suggest you use standard packages for your drivers and deploy them during the TS. This is the preferred and supported way of doing it, and is likely to be the method you will find most online help for in getting it setup. To me, it doesn't make a pile of sense to apply drivers after the OS has been laid down when you have a method of applying them during the imaging process itself. Just my opinion though.

[speall]

Thanks for the response although it seems a bit counter intuitive to provide the ability to include drivers in the catalog if it causes a problem. We aren't really that concerned about the WSUS catalog size really so it is a question of whether it is possible to get updates this way?

We have quite a lot of different devices that will be imaged from our windows 10 gold image which is why we are trying to avoid the driver deployment at the task sequence level.

If it cant be done then it cant be done and we will move to the task sequence method.

Thanks,

Simon 

[simulacra75]

It's my understanding that the purpose of importing drivers in the WSUS DB is for the purpose of deploying to machines that are already built/imaged, not to supplement the actual imaging process. What you could try is imaging the computer with a completely "vanilla" build&capture image, see what drivers are missing after the imaging process and then just download these drivers and create a drivers package or deploy using the dism command against a standard package (my preferred method). I'm kinda surprised that you don't have some set of hardware "standards" that you maintain, this makes it a lot easier to manage your hardware inventory and imaging processes, but if you don't, you don't.

Another suggestion is t try and determine what is the most common model of machine that you intend to image, prepare a TS for that model alone. That at least targets the maximum number of "default" machines in your org.

Personally the Task Sequences i manage handle over 35 different models of machine from 4 different manufacturers. This is reasonably manageable for me. I wouldn't try and get a "magic" bullet solution that will fit every possible scenario, it most likely doesn't exist here.