One of the things I often get asked by customers is how do they make it possible for a user to rebuild a failed machine at their desk, without requiring that the machine is moved to a special collection, or other administrative input.  There are several problems with doing this:

• Config Mgr & the machine (if the OS is running) remember that the machine has run the OS deployment task sequence before, so will not execute the task sequence again.  The solution to this is to add a mandatory recurring schedule.  However, this means that as long as the machine remains in the collection that the task sequence is targeted at it will try to rebuild itself according to the schedule.
• If you advertise a slightly different task sequence at the machine collection without making it mandatory this could get around this (the first time at least), but the user will be prompted that there is an optional operating system deployment available for them.  In the standard software distribution case we can suppress this by selecting the "Suppress program notifications" option in the Program.  This option is not available when advertising task sequences, so it is not an option here (as useful as it would be).

One of my colleagues shared a great way of making this happen by leveraging the way WinPE behaves.  One of the options you get inside the task sequence is to specify which client platform that the task sequence can run on. 

This is useful in a number of situations, one where you are doing an OS upgrade and don't want to rebuild machines that are already at the current release.  In this case you would say it can run on Windows XP but not Windows Vista.  The other situation would be where you are using task sequences to do complicated software installations that need a lot of chained tasks or logic in place, and need to control which OS versions it can run on.  However where your OS is in a steady state (e.g. everyone running Windows Vista SP1) then the client platform targeting doesn't help much for operating system deployment, except in the case I outline above.  In this case we can now target the task sequence at an operating system you don't have in your environment - in the screenshot above I have selected x86 Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (you don't still have this right?).  In this case we can advertise our task sequence at our collection with our standard machines, make it mandatory & recurring, but because they don't meet the client platform requirement, they will simply ignore the task sequence advertisement.

The magic comes when you PXE boot and run the task sequence inside WinPE.  WinPE just ignores any of the client platform requirements (which makes sense, since it isn't any of those client platforms so if that was set the task sequence could never execute inside WinPE, and also WinPE has no way of knowing what any existing OS on the machine might be).  WinPE will pick up the recurrence and mandatory nature of the advertisement, so the users can execute an F12 rebuild of their machine at their desk with no administrative input.

 Thanks to Andrew Cobb for the idea!

I'm mostly posting this as a reminder to myself, but someone may find it useful.  This is the subselect syntax for ConfigMgr queries, so you can do a query along the lines of "Show me all the machines that meet criteria X except the machines that meet criteria Y".  My SQL skills are weak, so this is my permanent record of this.

select SMS_R_System.Name from  SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.SystemGroupName = "Domain\\GroupName" and SMS_R_System.Name not in (select SMS_R_System.Name from  SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS on SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.DisplayName = "ApplicationX")

This particular subselect looks for machines that are members of a particular AD System Group called "Domain\GroupName" (note that you need two backslashes in the query to escape the special character) that don't have an application called "ApplicationX" present in Add/Remove Programs.  If you're resourceful you'll be able to modify this to do other stuff as well.

Thanks Jaimie!

Like I said before, I don't like to use this blog to simply mirror product announcements (although can I just say - the Windows 7 beta rocks!).  I talk a lot to customers about Operating System Deployment in System Center Configuration Manager.  With the ability to deploy server operating systems with it as well a lot of customers are using the ConfigMgr OSD technology to provide a single provisioning location for their Windows clients and servers.  It's a great way to do it, as the technologies are essentially the same.  If you can deploy Windows Vista, you can deploy Windows Server 2008.  If you can deploy Windows XP, you can deploy Windows Server 2003.  However some things a slightly different for servers as they have some unique hardware requirements that you don't have to do on workstations (e.g. configuring the hardware RAID etc etc).  This is where our partners at Dell, HP & IBM are extending the ConfigMgr platform and providing tools that plug in to the OSD framework and let you configure their server hardware as part of a task sequence.

Dell released their tool late last month: Dell Deployment Pack for ConfigMgr

IBM released their tool at the end of last year: IBM Deployment Pack for ConfigMgr

Now all we need is the HP pack and we've got the whole set!

For those that want them, here are the PowerPoint presentations from the DPM Unplugged events that ran in Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch last week.  I hope that all who attended enjoyed the events, and got a lot out of them, and thanks to Peter Niven for making it over and working so hard presenting. 

I made a decision when I started this blog to only use it for original content and not just repost links to other site (which explains why I don't post frequently).  However this one is near and dear to my heart.  We have some DPM technical events coming up in a couple of weeks, and I'd really like to see these events full.  DPM is a really exciting data protection & backup technology for Windows workloads, and this event will be great for learning about the technology behind it.  The event details are below, it's a free event so please sign up and get along.