Good day everyone.
We have a diverse PC and laptop environment, with several OEMs providing the hardware. Windows licenses come from the OEM. We use OpenLDAP as a directory server.
For the computers to join the domain, and to adhere to internal security policies, several changes are made to an image, including registry modifications and group policy customizations. Sysprep /generalize removes these configurations.
The default Image capture wizard action is to sysprep with /generalize. While I do understand this enables the image to be applied to several hardware configurations, the particularities of this environment requires me to take such changes with the image. For this initial step we will not implement such modifications using fixlets, the image must be installed as it was before on hardware of the same type.
So my question for you: Is it possible to disable generalization when capturing? I could not find this options on the tasks themselves, it seems to go only one way.
If not, can I manually sysprep and use the capture wizard to get the image (given it will understand I sysprepped and skip this part)?
And if not, is there a procedure somewhere to manually capture the image to be used by Bigfix/TPM to deploy in similar hardware?
We use Bigfix 9.2, latest patches, image is of Windows 7.
Thank you for your help and time.
In that case you’re actually performing a backup/restore operation, not a clone & deploy operation. If you don’t use sysprep /generalize, the Windows machine will not properly go through Windows Activation (because all of the clones will have the same Client ID). It will also not reset its SID - which can have a lot of odd effects, in particular with local groups on different computers having SID collisions and weird permissions.
That said, try using the Image Library dashboard to import a WIM image you captured with whatever other means you’re using and see if that will work for you.
Jason, thanks for the reply, and sorry for the delayed response.
This company uses licenses that come with the computers, they have a special deal with the manufacturer. Since their infra is linux-based and only workstations use Windows, uniqueness information (like OS identifiers) are not important. Implementing as the backup/restore op was what they wanted.
Thanks for the clarification.
Cheers.