SCCM basic questions, that I am hoping to get answered for

[clivebuckwheat]

Hi

 

I am roughly about a week deep into the SCCM world after years of using ghost, and I have a few questions that I am hoping someone will answer here.

 

1. I know sccm can use pxe for os deployment, once you setup the pxe service point and configure it. Does this mean all machines in my environment have to have the first boot device set to the network card to have this happen?, if no task is advertise the machines should boot to the hard drive after a certain time is this correct?

 

2. If I do not want to use pxe, is the another method that sccm has available, such as building an sccm deployment boot partition on my reference image that the clients can boot to once a task is advertised?. As I do not want to boot the machines with cd's/dvd/usb.

 

 

Here's my scenario, say I have a lab of 45 pc's

 

 

 

If I set the boot order as follows.

 

1.dvd

 

2.hard drive

 

3. pxe

 

 

 

If I then advertise a task to re-image a that lab of 45 pc's, would not someone have to go physically boot all the pc's to pxe so that the task would kick off?, so the re-imaging will take place. Isn't there a way to image a lab with 0 touch or user intervention?

[ersatyle]

Hi, I think (I'm not sure as I didn't test it, if I'm wrong please correct me) that you can advertise a mandatory task sequence, on already existing machine with sccm client working it will modify the boot manager to boot directly into the winpe environment, and then run the task sequence

[clivebuckwheat]

Thanks I appreciate the response.

 

Hi, I think (I'm not sure as I didn't test it, if I'm wrong please correct me) that you can advertise a mandatory task sequence, on already existing machine with sccm client working it will modify the boot manager to boot directly into the winpe environment, and then run the task sequence

[CorradoGuy]

When you use zero-touch with SCCM it will always look for an active advertisement otherwise it will not allow the machine to boot through the network adapter. As the machine boots through PXE it first checks to see if there is an active advertisement for the MAC or GUID and if it is not found SCCM instructs the machine to boot with the next item in the boot list.

 

You can configure SCCM to boot with zero-touch using PXE boot which will image the machine based off of the collection that your image is based against. You can also use light-touch which will promt you for what image you want applied and this also uses PXE boot.

 

You can also create bootable media such as CD/DVD or a USB device to get the machine to boot for a new image. All of these options can be configured so you have a wide choice of how to get the machine to image and it really depends on what you want to do.

 

I use PXE boot with zero-touch and set the advertisement to never re-run the job no matter what and this way the machine will only take the one image and never try to re-image the machine if the boot order was changed. As long as you remove the machine from the imaging collection then it would not be an issue.

[Ackros]

"can also use light-touch which will promt you for what image you want applied "

 

light touch???