OSD in SCCM 2007

There have been quite a few updates to OSD in SCCM 2007. I’ll use the next several entries to go over some of the key changes. For this entry lets discuss one key change that applies to provisioning a bare metal machine.

Current releases of the OSD feature pack allow an operating system to be installed on a bare metal machine by simply booting it to either the OSD image installation CD or PXE booting. From there it is a simple matter of choosing the OS to install and allow the installation to complete. The potential problem with this approach is the fact that there is no control over which systems are able to be provisioned and which were not. Any machine booted using the proper CD is able to access the SMS infrastructure to load an image.

Provisioning a bare metal machine in SCCM 2007 requires that the machine be managed by SCCM. If the machine is being reimaged and was already a SCCM client there is no administrator action required. If the machine is a new system, it is required that the administrator manually add the system as managed in SCCM. This is done by using the ‘computer information import’ wizard and supplying the system name, SMBIOS ID and/or the MAC address. Then, once the system is added to SCCM the administrator must target a task sequence (more on these in later entries), which is the deloyment mechanism in SCCM, to the system. Now when the system boots it will find it’s entry in SCCM and can install the targeted task sequences. Systems that are not in the SCCM database will display an error message.