Best Practices recommendation for creation and customization of Vista image to be used in Zero Touch Deployment using SMS and BDD - I
While capturing the base image, extreme care has to be taken as this image will be replicated across all machines in the enterprise. Based on past experiences, the following recommendations are provided:
Software to install
· Before capturing the image, ensure that all enterprise wide software is installed in the core image.
· The base image should contain the enterprise standard firewall and anti-virus clients to ensure that the image starts up with the requisite security configuration pre-installed.
· Try to include as many base packages into the image as possible to limit the time required during the deployment. It is generally noted that installing an image with the software pre-installed is a lot faster than installing the image and then installing the software separately.
· Include the SMS Advanced Client in the base image.
Before capturing the final image, it is advisable to perform the following actions:
· Perform a complete disk scan to ensure that there are no cluster errors as these will be replicated to all the systems.
· Perform a disk-cleanup and delete all un-necessary information from the base image.
· Run a complete virus-scan on the machine to ensure that the base image contains no virus.
· Clear all log files and clear the event logs from the machine to ensure that while supporting the deployments, it will be easy to identify the most recent changes.
· Include information about your build (build version, details, supported hardware, etc.) into the image so that it can be used for troubleshooting.
· Execute “ccmdelcert” on the machine to delete any previous SMS client certificates from the machine.
· Execute “net stop ccmexec” to stop SMS client.
