Operating System Deployment
I am curious to hear anyone's experience using DC's OS Deployment feature. I have been using Microsoft MDT for 5+ years and am having some difficulty making the switch. There are a couple of things that bother me with DC OSD.
1: Why can't I import a Windows ISO for deployment instead of REQUIRING capture of a target machine?
2: Why do I need to create applications just for OSD? Why can't I use applications that ALREADY EXIST IN MY DC SOFTWARE REPO? This approach requires maintenance of 2 separate application repositories! This is the most glaring evidence that this functionality was shoehorned into the product, rather than developed as a native component. I am struggling to find a reliable way to automate software installation only on newly deployed computers using DC configurations. If I target an AD OU, the configurations will not be applied unless AD has been recently synced. Currently I am using Custom Dynamic Groups based on machine names, as our naming conventions group computers that belong to a specific office using a prefix in the machine name.
3: Has anyone figured out how to deploy images to multiple sites? Currently, our MDT deployment data is replicated throughout our domain (105 physical remote sites) using DFSN/R. Under this system, our deployment boot media looks for the DFS namespace (\\domain.com\deployment) and connects to the server with the lowest cost. MDT has it's own headaches, but it is free and much more flexible when it comes to multi site.
I'm curious to hear how others are using this feature and incorporating it into your workflow.
1: Why can't I import a Windows ISO for deployment instead of REQUIRING capture of a target machine?
2: Why do I need to create applications just for OSD? Why can't I use applications that ALREADY EXIST IN MY DC SOFTWARE REPO? This approach requires maintenance of 2 separate application repositories! This is the most glaring evidence that this functionality was shoehorned into the product, rather than developed as a native component. I am struggling to find a reliable way to automate software installation only on newly deployed computers using DC configurations. If I target an AD OU, the configurations will not be applied unless AD has been recently synced. Currently I am using Custom Dynamic Groups based on machine names, as our naming conventions group computers that belong to a specific office using a prefix in the machine name.
3: Has anyone figured out how to deploy images to multiple sites? Currently, our MDT deployment data is replicated throughout our domain (105 physical remote sites) using DFSN/R. Under this system, our deployment boot media looks for the DFS namespace (\\domain.com\deployment) and connects to the server with the lowest cost. MDT has it's own headaches, but it is free and much more flexible when it comes to multi site.
I'm curious to hear how others are using this feature and incorporating it into your workflow.