Arguably the most challenging task of an SOE deployment is determining how to capture users’ data and application settings, and then restore it post image deployment. The speed and accuracy of this task has possibly the biggest impact on a user’s perceived success (or otherwise) of the project. Windows 7 may be a wonderful operating system; but for users – that will count for nothing if they lose a bunch of important mail from a locally stored pst file, or lose the photos of their last family holiday.
To mitigate this risk, I’ve seen cases where every machine had an image taken and stored in a cupboard prior to reimaging. Overkill? Maybe…
In our case we’ll be using USMT 4.0. There are plenty of new features, but my favourite is the Hard-Link migration store. Typically when running USMT, we would either choose to store the captured state on a network location, or in a protected area on the local disk. With hard-link migration, captured files are stored locally, but are not actually copied from their original location. Instead, a directory of hard-links to the data is created in a protected folder on the disk. The links are then re-mapped to the new locations once the new image has been deployed. Because there is no need to move data around on the disk, the time taken to capture and then restore user state is significantly reduced.
In this case, I’m using an SCCM 2007 SP2 Task Sequence to capture state, deploy the SOE image and restore the state.
Using the local storage with hard-link option, we’re not actually re-partitioning or formatting the drive…instead the drive is “wiped”, leaving the protected folders behind. I’ve found that in a small number of cases the “wipe” process has failed to delete some data, resulting in the Task Sequence failing when attempting to apply the image. Fortunately, while still in PE, the captured user state can be manually copied to a network location, and restored later using the loadstate command line after re-applying the image.
One Comment
Very nice… it’s so easy to miss stuff when you backup manually.
I like how it even migrates iTunes settings: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560792(WS.10).aspx.