Hi Team,
Please suggest which one is better for OS deployment WDS or Bigfix?
Also if i will choose Bigfix in my environment for OSD then how complex it is to start?
WDS alone isn’t really a competitor to BigFix OSD unless you are literally just hosting bare ISOs. BigFix OSD is more like WDS + MDT, and actually uses MDT. Some nice things about BigFix:
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You can use your relays as deployment servers. Kinda hard to do with MDT, but reduces network traffic in a lot of network architectures.
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Supports Linux
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Much easier to create a basic image. MDT takes a little getting used to, whereas there is one basic form for creating imaging tasks (bundled together in a Profile).
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Easier to update post-deployment tasks if you use baselines. I’m sure you can use automation plans too but I haven’t done it yet.
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Almost forgot drivers. I really don’t like driver management in MDT, but it’s super easy in BigFix.
How complex is it to start? Depends. Most of your complexity comes from your network and those challenges exist for any operating system deployment solution (so far as I know). You can just follow the OSD User Guide and you can be up and running pretty quickly.
Where would one find the latest OSD user guide?
make sure to expand out the table of contents so you can see the full guide.
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I’ve setup both before and they both have their own challenges. WDS/MDT probably requires a little more initial setup time but it’s not a ton more.
I am pretty invested into OSD now and staying with it. I will say that, while rare, some issues that arise are extremely challenging to root-cause. The pool of people using it is much smaller, it’s hard to find someone else on the internet that has experienced your problem and posted any sort of solution. The logs are often buried and obscured and challenging to find / to make sense of them. Support has helped me through it each time but sometimes it has taken a while to figure it out. The vast majority of the time it’s functional and easier to use, and requires less tinkering. I think it’s the better of the two.
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We’ve had several issues getting OSD to work with HP Proliant G9/G10 servers with the changes to UEFI. More so for Linux, but at times for Windows.
We’re looking to implement HP Oneview to handle OS Deployment since it handles all the health alerts as well.
I hope we can use deploy OS on those system which already have old running Windows OS.
Because i have some confusion if it will only deploy OS on a new Laptop.
You can both remotely reimage an existing Windows installation and image a brand new laptop via PXE boot using a bare metal OSD server.