3. Advertise the Reference Image Task Sequence
ConfigMgr uses advertisements to tell computers what
work they should do and when they should do it. An advertisement links
the workload with a collection of computers. You have created a task
sequence and now you are going to advertise it to the Operating System
Deployment collection. The process to do so is quite easy:
Navigate to the task sequence in Configuration Manager Console, select it, and click on Advertise in the Actions pane.
The New Advertisement Wizard (shown in Figure 15)
launches. The default name of the advertisement is inherited from the
task sequence. Rename it if you wish. Pick a collection that this
advertisement will target. In our case it will be the Operating System
Deployment collection. This limits the task sequence to the machines
that are members of the collection.
A
collection can have subcollections. For example, you could have
subcollections called Reference, Test, and Pilot within the Operating
System Deployment collection. That would allow for a complex test and
development environment. By default, the advertisement will be inherited
by subcollections, but to avoid this inheritance clear the "Include
members of subcollections" check box.
Select
the "Make this task sequence available to boot media and PXE" check
box. (It must be selected, which it is not by default.)
The Schedule screen (Figure 16)
allows you to define when an advertisement is available to clients and
when it expires. The Mandatory Assignments box allows you to define when
clients must run the advertisement. Click on the star-shaped button to
create a new mandatory assignment with the As Soon As Possible value.
There
is another interesting check box which you don't need to use now but
that will be of use later. The Enable Wake On LAN check box allows the
advertisement to wake up a powered-down computer to run the
advertisement. The requirements are that the hardware supports it and
that the advertisement has been downloaded to the computer while it was
powered up. Where could this capability be useful? You could advertise
an OSD with a mandatory assignment of midnight on Saturday to existing
computers with Wake On LAN enabled. Even if a PC is turned off, it will
wake up and run the operating system installation task sequence. Nobody
needs to be in and no users experience downtime. Users will come in
after the weekend to find Windows 7 running instead of Windows XP or
Windows Vista. That's zero touch installation at its best!
Skip through the rest of the wizard with the default values. Now the advertisement is ready to run.
4. Run the Reference Image Task Sequence
There are two ways to run the task sequence. The
first way is to boot up the reference image computer using a PXE-based
network boot. All the work to enable that capability has been completed.
We'll come back to that in a few moments. The other way is to create
some form of boot media. That approach will be useful if you cannot use
PXE network boots.
You can create bootable media by selecting the task
sequence and clicking on Create Task Sequence Media in the Actions pane.
Select Bootable media in the Task Sequence Media Wizard and click Next.
As you can see in Figure 17, you now have the choice of creating a USB stick that will run the task sequence or a CD/DVD ISO file.
If you are using a virtual machine lab, then you
might find using an ISO easier and quicker than setting up a PXE service
point. But that would deprive you of the learning experience of doing
all the required configurations. You can create the ISO file, copy it to
the host machine, mount it with the blank reference virtual machine,
and boot it up. You might not be able to create a USB flash drive if you
are using some virtualization technologies. Such would be the case with
Hyper-V without the use of third-party USB products.
You are going to use the already configured PXE boot
option. The reference computer has the ability to boot up from the
network. The PXE service point is configured. The task sequence is
linked to a boot image. The task sequence is advertised to a collection.
All we need to do is force the reference computer to boot up using PXE.
The
reference machine needs to be configured to be able to boot from the
network. Doing so requires a compatible network card and the feature
enabled in the BIOS. A computer with no operating system will usually
boot up from the network to find a boot image. If an operating system is
installed, you can force a PXE boot during the power-on self-test
(POST) just after the machine powers up. Quite often this is done by
pressing the F12 key, but the method varies depending on the
manufacturer. If you are using Hyper-V as your virtualization
technology, you will need to use a Legacy Network Adapter (not the
synthetic one) to have PXE functionality in the virtual machine.
Once
the reference machine powers up, you should see the boot image download
and start up. If your PXE service point is password protected, you have
to enter the password. All of the work will be done by the task
sequence so everything after this should be automated.
If there are any problems with the PXE boot, you should inspect the smspxe.log file, which you can find in C:\Program Fi1es\SMS_CCM\Logs on the site server that has the PXE service point. Your 64-bit computers will have that file in the C:\Program Files (x86)\SMS_CCM\Logs folder.
The
task sequence begins. First, the availability of all the package
dependencies on a distribution point is checked. A common problem is
that the network access account has not been correctly configured for
the Computer Client Agent. This will cause an error that says a
particular package is not available. You need to keep an eye on things
here. This is because the client will automatically reboot the machine
after a few seconds if the task sequence fails.
This
task sequence will install Windows 7, install the ConfigMgr client,
install any available software updates or software distribution
packages, run Sysprep, and create Windows 7 Pro x64.wim at \\dep1oysrv\image$\.
The entire process will only require you to power up the machine (and
maybe enter the PXE service point password if you enabled that). After
that you can go for lunch, do some other work, or maybe go home for the
day. The WIM file will be waiting there for you after a little while.
You now have a reference image with your customized
Windows 7 build. You need to identify the Windows 7 capable machines
that are on your network that you want to re-install with your Windows 7
reference image. And that is what we will do next.
Any errors during an OSD task sequence will appear the smsts.log file. The location of the file depends on the scenario:
If task sequence completes when running in
the full operating system with a ConfigMgr client installed on the
computer, then it will be in %Windir%\System32\Ccm\Logs for 32-bit machines and %Windir%\SysWOW64\Ccm\Logs for 64-bit machines.
If
the task sequence completes when running in an installed operating
system with no ConfigMgr client installed on the computer, then it will
be in %Temp%\SMSTSLOG.
If the task sequence completes while running in Windows PE, then it will be in <largest fixed partition>\SMSTSLOG.
