Thanks for your post. I worked through the process over the last few days, and I think I understand what SCCM 2012 R2 has to offer with regards to VHD creation, which it turns out is not much at all.
It feels like the VHD builder in SCCM 2012 R2 is no more than a simple powershell exercise that one could cobble together in a few days, and not very practical. It will only self-contained media for deployment which it must build every time the process runs. So the temporary media it builds has to have all the packages referenced in the TS rather than being able to pull them from DPs. So just the “media” to create the VHD has to be 70-80GB or more depending on how much you want to include in your VHD template -- definitely not something I want to wait to rebuild every time I want to create a new VHD . To be even marginally useful, the process would need to work with bootable media instead of self-contained media. I think I am better off just creating a VM in Hyper-V console on my own and then booting from a boot media CD and running a slightly modified build and capture Task Sequence. The only difference really, is at the end where the existing B&C task sequence reboots into WinPE and captures the WIM out to the network. For building a generalized VHD, I would just want to shut down at that point and the VHD would be sitting there generalized waiting for the boot. The VHD stuff that is in SCCM 2012 R2 is borderline unusable. I can see why so little information is on the web beyond rudimentary screenshot walk-throughs. This is the sort of stuff I think Microsoft should be working on developing and building out. The current state of SCCM feels like the product managers are out wandering the forest lost, trying to manage iOS and Linux and Macintosh and Android. There has been no meaningful development in SCCM for Windows management – you know, it’s core function -- in over 2 years. The previews of the v.Next sound like this problem is growing. It makes me want to quit managing Windows and find some other niche of IT to work in. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Hunt Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2015 7:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MDT-OSD] Questions about SCCM 2012 R2 and VHDs An SCCM task sequence will only do what you tell it to do. If you tell it to sysprep and generalize, it will. i can't answer whether VMM will take care of the generalization, though a quick google gave me a page link to say how to create templates (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg696970.aspx) It looks like VMM does not generalize the VM, it needs to be added to the library ready-to-go/ something we found (using MDT 2013 to build our VMware templates) is that executing Sysprep will only work for Microsoft technologies... When you deploy the VM via a microsoft deployment tool, it will inject unattend.xml files and bootstrap files into the right locations to ensure it works as designed.... if you deploy to VMware, DO NOT sysprep. IT WILL BREAK the guest customizations. VMware will sysprep itself when you deploy from template. in short, use MDT if you can for capturing, it will leave the VM in a management system agnostic state. If you use SCCM, you need to ensure that you perform clean up tasks before "capturing" the VM. thats my 2 cents On 13 June 2015 at 08:44, Miller, Todd <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: When I use SCCM to build a VHD, does it generalize the VHD for use as a master VM automatically or is it making an image that is suitable for only a single VM? When I pass the VHD that SCCM creates to the Virtualization team, is that VM going to be generalized, or does VMM take care of generalizing the VHD, or if we want to end up with 40 personal/persistent VMs, do I need to create 40 VHDs and hand them all off to the Virtualization team. Similarly, is it possible to use SCCM 2012 R2 to create a VHD that is suitable for pooled use? Does my task sequence have to take care of the generalization? I guess what I don’t know is, it feels like I should be using a TS that is similar to Build and Capture to build these VHDs so that they can be used as templates for new machines in VMM rather than a standard deployment TS where there is a one-to-one VHD to VM relationship. There are 1000 blogs out there with screenshots of how to create the VHD in SCCM 2012r2, but they are all very light on discussion or guidance. Create the VHD and hand it off/upload it to VMM…. And then what? ________________________________ Notice: This UI Health Care e-mail (including attachments) is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. 2510-2521, is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any retention, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Please reply to the sender that you have received the message in error, then delete it. Thank you. ________________________________ ________________________________ Notice: This UI Health Care e-mail (including attachments) is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. 2510-2521, is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any retention, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Please reply to the sender that you have received the message in error, then delete it. Thank you. ________________________________
