What’s the current best practice for getting gigabytes of files distributed to numerous clients? My searches all either bring up 20-year-old articles or unrelated posts that share the same words.
Specifically, this is to get Windows 11 installation files pre-cached on Windows 10 clients so that IT can then work with the user to run setup and perform an in-place upgrade without having to wait while the files download. We only have BigFix Patch deployed (no OSD or Software Deployment), but have used Patch to author our own software deployment content for many years. I imagine there are client settings that need to be tweaked as well as possible considerations for continuing interrupted transfers (perhaps using BITS?).
Hopefully there are useful bits of how-to documentation already written that someone can point me to. If not, anyone interested in helping me to write some now?
I assume you’re planning to distribute the ISO in advance so you can either schedule the in place upgrade or allow the user to initiate the process.
There some prereq checking that you’ll need to do, including verifiying disk space, and whether there is enough space in the reserved partition on UEFI systems.
I would recommend looking at the fixlets in Patches for Windows - Windows 11 Business Editions Version 24H2 Available. They are a good starting point for your project.
You can clone the fixlet, and modify it for your ISO, if needed, along with stripping out the action script that performs the upgrade process (You should also consider using the File Pre-Cache Wizard from BES Support),
Then you can take action on the modified fixlet to begin the file delivery process.
It looks like we shove the ISO’s contents into a .zip file, then prefetch that down to the clients, distributing downloads ahead of action start time, and explode it into a working directory. (There may be some customizations buried in there?) Then we execute it with
