BigFix OSD capabilities

Usage and Config OSD
1

I am looking for some help in understanding what the benefits would be to using OSD within BigFix over our zero-touch operation with SCCM and MDT currently. I can see that BigFix supports MDT bundles so that will make it easier to move over to it, but I’m trying to find ways to convince our desktop team to use it so we can have as much functionality under one umbrella as possible.

Interested in hearing from others who have made similar moves (SCCM or similar to BigFix OSD).

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What benefits are you anticipating? If you already have a fully-fleshed zero-touch operation, there’s really not much getting better than that. Having used OSD for a few years, there are a few that I can think of, you’ll need to decide whether they apply:

  1. You could remove the cost of SCCM
  2. You can use OSD to deploy other operating systems (RHEL)
  3. The OSD Bare Metal Server can deploy “Scripting Environments” to do things like BIOS configs and firmware flashes (this cannot yet be driven through the BigFix Dashboards, but appears to still work if you connect directly to the OSD web interfaces)
  4. The BigFix OSD Dashboards make it easier to synch images/profiles between multiple servers / sites
  5. No tie-ins to Active Directory; we’re pushing the same images through the same infrastructure to multiple Active Directory forests, I’m not sure how well SCCM handles that.
3

Thanks.
In addition, enhanced driver management in BigFix OSD makes deploying a single image to multiple hw models much easier. Also, at the end of the deployment a BigFix client is up and running and connected to the BigFix environment, so you are ready to go for all the other great BigFix features.

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Update: While I wasn’t looking, BigFix added Task 302 “Deploy Scripting Environment on Bare Metal Targets”. Haven’t tried it out yet, but that might help with firmware updates.

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