TechAgility

I was recently looking for info regarding how to manage or integrate Windows Thin Clients (XPe/WES) with SCCM.

To the best of my knowledge the formal stance has always been “we supply the Macro components to support SCCM Agents in the build – the rest is up to the Customer” and my understanding is that this was mainly around the concern that this solution was never able to support “bare metal imaging” to be able to reimage the devices?

Please be aware that I have not attempted to get this working myself, this is merely the research that I have done just in case I was asked to implement it, and although some may see it as hugely beneficial to have both Thin Clients and PC’s being managed from a single console – the flip side to this is that the SCCM console and management structure does NOT know how to handle or treat devices that have a Write Filter

• Or if it was possible to image but this was still in a grey area of being un-supported?
• It seems that it might actually be possible to image with WES 2009 onwards as indicated in this article?
• Embedded OS Deployment with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
  One of the new features in Windows Embedded Standard 2009 is the support of SCCM operating system deployment. This means, any Standard image can be deployed the same way images for desktop or server machines are deployed within an SCCM infrastructure. Previously, it was not possible to deploy XP embedded images, because XPe did not support the Sysprep utility.
  • More at source ….

Looking a bit further ahead towards the end of the year with WES 7 however it looks like this imaging issue will be overcome as MS will then support imaging? BUT only to WES 7 devices as it will then be able to be imaged using the ImageX based process?

Other than that I have collated some details below that seems to pretty much map it out that it shouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish – but it would appear that it would be a better idea to go with FBWF to have more flexibility with coping with the SCCM Agent side of things

Creating SCCM software update packages

There is no fundamental difference between creating software deployment packages for a normal Windows XP Professional or a Windows Embedded Standard system. If you are new to this, Microsoft Technet, with its documentation and whitepapers, is a very valuable resource to get things started. However, especially when Embedded Enabling Features (EEF’s) or the limitations of embedded devices come into play, deployment packages for embedded devices need to be created with a slightly different mind set than those for enterprise scenarios.

More at source….

Advanced System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Software Deployment Scenarios
Change management scenarios of embedded devices are sometimes much harder to handle than those of corporate desktops. This is especially true when you consider the way users interact with devices. System Center offers a control panel applet users and administrators can use for local interaction with the Configuration Manager infrastructure. This works fine for Windows Embedded Standard Devices as long as they run explorer shell the same way corporate desktops do. If embedded devices run their own shell these options are gone, because no access to the applets can be provided.

More at source….

Write Filters Support for Mass Deployment in Windows Embedded Standard 7

Mass deployment is the process of creating a master Windows Embedded Standard 7 runtime image on a reference system and then deploying this image to multiple target systems. The deployment process typically uses specific tools such as System Preparation tool (sysprep.exe) and Imagex.exe as well as Windows PE Environment to perform the following tasks:

• Generalize the master system by removing machine specific information
• Capture the system into a Windows image (wim) file
• Apply the image (wim) to the target system
• Specialize the image to the target machine.

Write Filters (EWF and FBWF) in WES7 are delivering sysprep providers to enable seamless settings transfer during mass deployment scenarios. These providers are part of the regular write filter (EWF or FBWF) packages. They are also invoked automatically when users run sysprep command, i.e. they do not require any user interaction. So, if a user is deploying a master image with FBWF protecting the system volume (C:) and having a folder (Documents) in the exclusion list, all target systems will end up protecting the system volume (C:) and having (Documents) folder in the exclusion list. Similarly, if EWF is protecting the system volume (Disk 0, Partition 1) of the master image, all target systems will end up protecting the system volume (Disk 0, Partition 1).
More at source…

Beta SCCM R2 – How to get a Quick Test Lab for SCCM R2
This is not going to be a depth post… but just a post to say how to get yourself rapidly into a good place with SCCM R2. I have been asked a number of times how to gain access to or even build an SCCM R2 environment. As much fun as it is….. and it is fun! It does take a considerable amount of time!
I was chatting to Marco Cibis (PFE Germany) when we were on a training course together in Prague…. Marco is one of our SCCM guru/jedi knights …..

Anyway he sent me a great link for downloading a pre-configured VHD for SCCM
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=469af3b8-849d-4400-bded-9024c3db759f&DisplayLang=en
So that was stage one!!! download SCCM RTM for an eval….. saved me 10 hours

Some additional references:

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How to Manage Windows XP Embedded Write Filters Using Configuration Manager 2007

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb932175.aspx

Known Limitations in Configuration Manager Support for Windows XP Embedded

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb932123.aspx

I have also discovered this regarding getting T5720’s working with SCCM – but again the main issue will be no ability to image:

SCCM General – Generate a new GUID for the SCCM Client

It was not until I started working on getting our HP Thin Clients to work with SCCM imaging that I had to worry about generating a new GUID for the SCCM client without doing a repair or reinstallation.  You see the HP t5720 is really the thorn in my side.  The HP t5720 devices we have are 80% of our thin client population and only have 512MB of flash disk and 512MB of RAM.  In order to get the SCCM client to really work well with Windows XP Embedded 2002 it is ideal to have Service Pack 3 (SP3) for the OS.  What really hurts with that is there is not much free space left – even after removing the HP preload utilities that we do not use.  In fact there is not enough space to install the SCCM client.

Keep in mind that we are not joining these devices to the domain, patching them, or doing much more than a few configuration changes and enabling reporting and remote tools.  We use the HP Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) to lock the devices down and purge unwanted changes.

More at source…

written by dcaddick