Does anyone use Sysprep anymore?

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McFry

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With products like Acronis and Backup Exec, disc imaging has been finely tuned to a T. You can clone pretty much any system, throw it into a totally foreign box with completely dissimilar hardware and actually expect it to boot first time through with no problems minus an oddball driver issue here or there.

I used to use sysprep about 10 years ago when disc imagine was just that, a pure disc image. We're talking early WinXP days. You'd sysprep a box to basically trigger to setup phase when making mass deployments, since anything else would cause "issues". But does anybody really use sysprep today? Or is this old hat software relegated to the glory days of deploying PC's?

I ask because I accepted a new IT position and have been tasked with deploying a bunch of new pc's soon, and my peers keep going on about sysprepping an image with an answer file and I just want to say "yeaaaahhh, you dont really need to do it like that anymore, thats kind of old technology. Let me show you what my $50 copy of Acronis home edition can do."

My previous position all we used was acronis and symantec backup exec, and we deployed hundreds of PC's, perfectly, without issue. I just dont really understand why anybody would still be using sysprep today, unless they just dont know any better.
 
McFry said:
With products like Acronis and Backup Exec, disc imaging has been finely tuned to a T. You can clone pretty much any system, throw it into a totally foreign box with completely dissimilar hardware and actually expect it to boot first time through with no problems minus an oddball driver issue here or there.
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At one of my previous jobs, we didn't use third party backup/imaging tools simply because the licensing costs were simply too high for what we needed. Instead, we just used sysprep to deploy a very basic Windows 7 image and scripted the process of installing the software. Based on our needs, setting up our deployment procedure using in house scripts was the better route. The funding we could have spent on licenses for backup/deployment software that wouldn't have saved us much time or added much flexibility was better spent elsewhere due to our relatively small budget for software. At other places of employment, we have had much larger budgets and much different deployment needs, so buying software for deploying images was something that was done in a heartbeat. At my current employer, we use thin clients, so software like Acronis isn't really necessary.

McFry said:
I ask because I accepted a new IT position and have been tasked with deploying a bunch of new pc's soon, and my peers keep going on about sysprepping an image with an answer file and I just want to say "yeaaaahhh, you dont really need to do it like that anymore, thats kind of old technology. Let me show you what my $50 copy of Acronis home edition can do."
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The problem is, your $50 copy of Acronis is not licensed for use in your workplace. It's home software, and can only be used in the home. If your new workplace wished to purchase licenses for such software, I can assure you it would cost much, much more than $50. So depending on what your organization is doing and how they are funded, software like Acronis might be too expensive for the value it adds.
 
Dogs said:
The problem is, your $50 copy of Acronis is not licensed for use in your workplace. It's home software, and can only be used in the home. If your new workplace wished to purchase licenses for such software, I can assure you it would cost much, much more than $50. So depending on what your organization is doing and how they are funded, software like Acronis might be too expensive for the value it adds.
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True, the $50 home experiment would just be to demonstrate how much better an actual disc imagine product meant for system deployment could be than the freeware linux bootcd they're using right now.

Although truth be told, my previous employer actually contacted Acronis about using a stand-alone single USB based copy of True Image Enterprise, and they said as long as we are just using it for one pc at a time, there's nothing illegal about deploying 50,000 computers with it on a "single seat" license. The licensing schemes only come into play when you're running multiple concurrent deployments, using a pxe server, or utilizing the windows agent for scheduled backups.
 
You should still be sysprepping your Windows images. It's not there just to look pretty. I have stayed far from imaging programs, so it's possible they can generalize Windows image, but I still wouldn't rely on it.

If you want to save money, and don't like the "linux boot disk", then use a WinPE bootdisk. Microsoft makes, and gives away, all of the tools you need to do a mass deployment of Windows.
 
Demon10000 said:
If you want to save money, and don't like the "linux boot disk", then use a WinPE bootdisk. Microsoft makes, and gives away, all of the tools you need to do a mass deployment of Windows.
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At my old place of employment, we did a lot with WinPE. This includes using it to apply our sysprep'd images. I never encountered any major problems with it.
 
I sysprep all of my images and use the unattended xml files to customize the image after sysprep and to hold onto PnP drivers I installed. I've also used the unattended to copy over to the default program in a few scenarios.

Some stuff, like WSUS and System Center, can be sensitive to non-sysprepped machines. They can rely on machine SID rather than the one active directory generates, thus the sensitivity.
 
Wrench00 said:
I use Sysprep on my templates and WDS networks.
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Same, when i create new images for my WDS server i sysprep it, you kind of have to, i have a base image with all apps everyone in the office needs and uses and now doing 2 more images for web and dev with the apps they use.
 
I use Sysprep as well.

Only bad thing about it is that if you sysprep, then update and then sysprep again so many times, the image will fail.

It will work 5-6 times before it will start giving you problems.

My solution is to have a base Win7 image, and then do updates, etc. to it, and then sysprep.

Usually make a new image every few months.

Never gives me a single problem.

Why use a 3rd party program when MS provides tools that are perfectly capable and easy to use?
 
I use a version of it on my Citrix provisioning servers, create maint version, make changes, reseal (sysprep type) then promote the image, I can fully customize servers without the customer knowing, then just reboot their production box. Works like a champ
 
I whipped up a dism/sysprep'd Win7 image recently. It was free, relatively straightforward, and a native, free MS solution. I like that it still "installs like Windows" but with apps and things already installed.
 
We use SysPrep & Acronis Backup & Restore at our company for generic system images. The most systems we deployed "at the same time" was 40, and was a one off thing, usually it's a just a couple at a time for various clients.
 
cyclone3d said:
I use Sysprep as well.

Only bad thing about it is that if you sysprep, then update and then sysprep again so many times, the image will fail.

It will work 5-6 times before it will start giving you problems.

My solution is to have a base Win7 image, and then do updates, etc. to it, and then sysprep.

Usually make a new image every few months.

Never gives me a single problem.

Why use a 3rd party program when MS provides tools that are perfectly capable and easy to use?
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What I do is get the image right to before sysprepping it and then create a Ghost image. Then every couple months I restore the image, do any Windows updates and sysprep it and capture it for a new deployment image. Saves the 3 sysprep limit and makes it quick and easy to make a change to the image without starting from scratch.
 
We used it at my last work place. Sysprep on a 350-400 build per week on various in-house prebuilt machines, imaged captured and deployed over the network via a WDS server. It is handy if you want to configure/double check drivers, external/slip-streaming information onto the build without leaving a trace of anything else, so it looks and feels fresh to the user on first startup.
 
I only used sysprep with windows xp, since xp was prone to blue screening when swapping to a different motherboard.

Windows 7 on the other hand is much more resilient when changing hardware and booting up and finding everything.
I am still on my original windows 7 install from August of 2009 and I have upgraded motherboards and CPUs at least 4 times and did 1 clone when I installed an ssd.
I think this is my upgrade path with windows 7, E8400, Q9400, Q6600, i7 2600K, i7 3770k.
The only time I encountered a non boot situation is when one motherboard had ahci enabled by default and windows was installed with it off so it wouldn't boot, turning off ahci allowed the system to boot and find all the new hardware drivers. I then enabled ahci in windows so I wouldn't have that issue again.
 
Using Sysprep on your personal PC -- thats up to you. I don't know that it's going to make much of a different on a "home" PC. However, ignoring sysprep in a corporate environment where you're rolling out the same image to multiple people -- it's just not good practice.
 
Zepher said:
I only used sysprep with windows xp, since xp was prone to blue screening when swapping to a different motherboard.

Windows 7 on the other hand is much more resilient when changing hardware and booting up and finding everything.
I am still on my original windows 7 install from August of 2009 and I have upgraded motherboards and CPUs at least 4 times and did 1 clone when I installed an ssd.
I think this is my upgrade path with windows 7, E8400, Q9400, Q6600, i7 2600K, i7 3770k.
The only time I encountered a non boot situation is when one motherboard had ahci enabled by default and windows was installed with it off so it wouldn't boot, turning off ahci allowed the system to boot and find all the new hardware drivers. I then enabled ahci in windows so I wouldn't have that issue again.
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Oh wow, you can do that with Windows 7? Did you have do to do anything after changing out a CPU or motherboard? My knowledge is used to the Windows XP era where you were forced to reinstall Windows if you changed either motherboard or CPU. Enlighten me please! :)
 
There seems to be a lot of "why NOT use sysprep" arguments. I'm not sure how many of you have used professional backup utilities, but their advantages are as follows:

1. Much faster backup image time
2. Much smaller backup image file
3. Much faster image recovery time
4. Auto wipes SID's
5. Can inject customized drivers during image recovery (will auto-detect, so you can use a 10GB driverpack if you want)
6. Recovery to dissimilar hardware (this one is huge. You can make a single base image that you can deploy across any workstation/laptop)
7. Time to boot is significantly better. By this I mean sysprep'd image still does a bunch of stuff post recovery that requires idle waiting until your computer is actually in a usable state. An Acronis image is ready to go as soon as the recovery is finished.
8. Can do near 100% base software installation for an image. You dont have to neglect certain programs due to fear of unique identifiers causing conflicts (system agents etc) thus requiring total reinstalls of software post recovery. Anti-virus, backup products, network agents, you can install EVERYTHING you want on a computer, then back it up, and expect it to work and authenticate properly once the system is recovered.

Our average system footprint was probably 40-50GB. Our average image was about 10GB. The recovery time to load an image was about 8 minutes. Time to boot and rejoin to domain was about 8 minutes. So you could realistically turn a system around for a new employee in 15-30 minutes if you were feeling lazy. I just dont see that happening with sysprep.

Again I sort of sense an old-school culture to using sysprep "just because". We all started with it, it met our needs, and we never bothered to move on. Granted the only reason I got into 3rd party disc imaging was to backup critical end-user systems and improve recovery time for downed systems. Then I started to notice how useful pro disc imaging software was just for basic system deployments.
 
McFry said:
1. Much faster backup image time
3. Much faster image recovery time
...
7. Time to boot is significantly better. By this I mean sysprep'd image still does a bunch of stuff post recovery that requires idle waiting until your computer is actually in a usable state. An Acronis image is ready to go as soon as the recovery is finished.
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Having something happen more quickly is always a nice thing. It might not, however, make it worth switching. If imaging time isn't a huge factor, then having the third party software be faster is just 'nice', and nothing more.

At my previous job, we automated the deployment leg of imaging and ran our deployments off hours when nobody could access the computers anyways. It doesn't really matter, in that case, whether the deployment took 3 hours or 8 hours.

McFry said:
6. Recovery to dissimilar hardware (this one is huge. You can make a single base image that you can deploy across any workstation/laptop)
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Being able to recover to dissimilar hardware is pretty powerful. It is not, however, something that requires third-party tools. Microsoft already gives you everything you need in order to do this.

McFry said:
Again I sort of sense an old-school culture to using sysprep "just because". We all started with it, it met our needs, and we never bothered to move on.
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You have to remember that in most cases, 'moving on' has a licensing cost associated with it. If sysprep meets the needs, and the money can be better used elsewhere, why blow the money on some fancy software? For plenty of people, it comes down to getting the funding to purchase the software, and while I personally have ok'd license purchases for things that make things nicer to do, a lot of managers/directors/VPs are not going to approve software unless you can readily demonstrate that it is completely necessary. It all depends on what funds are available and who is making the decisions, and sometimes the system administrators and the helpdesk technicians aren't the ones who get the say.
 
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8. Can do near 100% base software installation for an image. You dont have to neglect certain programs due to fear of unique identifiers causing conflicts (system agents etc) thus requiring total reinstalls of software post recovery. Anti-virus, backup products, network agents, you can install EVERYTHING you want on a computer, then back it up, and expect it to work and authenticate properly once the system is recovered.
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I disagree with this. It can only generalize software it knows about. And if you come across one that it doesn't know about, then you're screwed. Here is an example:

I created a deployment through Configuration Manager. Our "smarter than me" tech decided to build a machine with Configuration Manager, and then clone it with his beloved Acronis.

Six months go by. Another tech works on one of these machines and finds it's having problems; some nasty virus infection. So he's going to rebuild it. He kicks off the build in Configuration Manager and then waits for the machine to rebuild. Across the country, users machines start rebooting and installing a new OS.

The software he used to create his clone didn't know enough that configuration manager had a GUID that identified the client. When a tech sent a build to one of the machines that were cloned, it sent it to ALL MACHINES that had that GUID, which was about 160 computers.

You might be able to build an image that deploys faster than a full sysprepped machine, but you're not going to get a cleaner, more up-to-date install than using a sysprepped machine with no software installed. This tech is no longer with the company. I don't know about you, but I would trade the extra 15 minutes it takes to build a machine, and keep my job. I like getting paid.



Updates to image based deployments are also difficult. Since you have one image, you end up impacting all of your models. Adding a driver, a piece of software, an update -- you don't know if it's going to work on all your machines. And I've been in the business long enough to know that we don't test the images on every piece of hardware before it goes out -- it's impossible. So when something breaks, it might be six months later, and you're no longer thinking about the image.

Using WAIK/MDT (and in my case, Configuration Manager), you create a task that tailors your sysprepped WIM. Adding a new piece of software has zero impact on your base image. Since you're creating tasks, you also have highly customizable options.

As an example, I have provided a mechanism for our techs to build machines. They choose an OS - winxp, win7, win8. From there, they choose what apps they want in it, or a template to pick from the most commonly built machines. Once the build is selected, they can PXE boot the machine and, using 1 task sequence, the image is deployed, software is installed, and then everything is updated. Yes, it takes a little bit longer (closer to 25 minutes), but it's much, much easier to support.


Again I sort of sense an old-school culture to using sysprep "just because". We all started with it, it met our needs, and we never bothered to move on
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Sysprepping for the reasons that we did back in NT/XP days -- yeah, thats gone. The duplicate sid issue is no more. However, sysprepping is far more than just replacing the SIDs with new unique values.

I would argue your point that people not sysprepping haven't taken the time to understand the Windows deployment methodology. It has a big learning curve and it's much easier to just buy a boxed piece of software than it is to get spend a few days labbing up some new, intimidating tech.
 
Cerulean said:
Oh wow, you can do that with Windows 7? Did you have do to do anything after changing out a CPU or motherboard? My knowledge is used to the Windows XP era where you were forced to reinstall Windows if you changed either motherboard or CPU. Enlighten me please! :)
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We've done over a dozen motherboard CPU swaps with windows 7 and they all booted up, found new hardware, and ran fine.
My brother went from an amd quad, to an amd 6 core, to a 2600k and now to a 3770k.
Upgraded my fathers machine from an amd quad to an i5, and my nephews pc from an amd 3 core with my fathers amd quad.
The most recent one was a couple of weeks ago when I upgraded my friends q9550 system to an i7 4770 and asus Sabertooth board.

The only thing to watch out is if ahci was not enabled on your old install and if the new board has it enabled, you will either blue screen and reboot, or it will just get stuck on a black screen.
 
Demon10000 said:
I disagree with this. It can only generalize software it knows about. And if you come across one that it doesn't know about, then you're screwed.
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I ran into one piece of software, an enterprise AV product, that required it's own "generalization" before imaging, but they had a document specific for imaging that explained the process. It took a few extra minutes, but I was glad they had it covered.
 
You guys obviously don't install drivers using WDS... It works very slick so yes I can deploy to dissimilar hardware and it auto joins the machines to the domain. It takes me about 10-15 mins to build a workstation that's ready for the user.

WDS is a must have in large environments IMO. We used to use ghost before I came along and setup wds and it was a PITA and slow.
 
/usr/home said:
You guys obviously don't install drivers using WDS... It works very slick so yes I can deploy to dissimilar hardware and it auto joins the machines to the domain. It takes me about 10-15 mins to build a workstation that's ready for the user.

WDS is a must have in large environments IMO. We used to use ghost before I came along and setup wds and it was a PITA and slow.
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If you have bulk of the machines that are the same. Just do a capture sysprep image of a physical machine always works for me.
 
I've been thinking of setting up WDS. I just set up a workstation, install the OS, drivers, and other software that never changes, then sysprep and capture the image, then have software that is frequently updated pulled down from Group Policy.

So with WDS, you burn a 'capture disc' that will pull an image off the hard drive and store it on the server? Also, once you get a multi-cast session going, can you boot from USB to join that or do you have to use PXE boot? I was under the impression that you could create a boot disc that automatically joins the server and starts pulling down the image, all without PXE.
 
I use sysprep when leveraging Hyper-V and differencing disks for my lab environment on my laptop. Parent disk is on msata solid state drive and differencing disks are on platter drives.
 
bigdogchris said:
I've been thinking of setting up WDS. I just set up a workstation, install the OS, drivers, and other software that never changes, then sysprep and capture the image, then have software that is frequently updated pulled down from Group Policy.

So with WDS, you burn a 'capture disc' that will pull an image off the hard drive and store it on the server? Also, once you get a multi-cast session going, can you boot from USB to join that or do you have to use PXE boot? I was under the impression that you could create a boot disc that automatically joins the server and starts pulling down the image, all without PXE.
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We captured the images of system builds (with all the required software, drivers for the different builds) to an external hard drive, this process usually takes about 5-10 minutes depending on the size of the image. Once captured onto the external hdd we then added the image to the WDS server, given the appropriate name for the build than it was deployed over the network via 2 48 port gbe switches connected to almost a dozen 4 port Soho's KVM's. Installation took anywhere between 15-4minutes on the different builds.
 
We use Numara/BMC Asset Core. Push OS through PXE Deployment, Join to domain, then push applications. Takes about 1 hours start to finish. Only 5 minutes of active time.
 
Matthew Kane said:
We captured the images of system builds (with all the required software, drivers for the different builds) to an external hard drive, this process usually takes about 5-10 minutes depending on the size of the image. Once captured onto the external hdd we then added the image to the WDS server, given the appropriate name for the build than it was deployed over the network via 2 48 port gbe switches connected to almost a dozen 4 port Soho's KVM's. Installation took anywhere between 15-4minutes on the different builds.
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What are you capturing the WDS images with, the "capture disc"? It rips a WIM, right?
 
just sysprep'd my new win 7 ent image today to deploy and started a windows 8.1 for testing out.
 
Demon10000 said:
Using Sysprep on your personal PC -- thats up to you. I don't know that it's going to make much of a different on a "home" PC. However, ignoring sysprep in a corporate environment where you're rolling out the same image to multiple people -- it's just not good practice.
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It can be disastrous in a corporate environment. Can make it seem like you have all sorts of weird gremlins and strange issues.

It is a little understood thing by many IT people, but extremely important. Those who think an imaging program is the same as sysprep are very wrong. Some imaging programs do automatically invoke sysprep.
 
bigdogchris said:
What are you capturing the WDS images with, the "capture disc"? It rips a WIM, right?
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Yes it goes to a WIM, though there are a lot of other considerations with doing an image this way.

You can do a basic save/restore (almost like ghost but using WIM tools/files) that is fairly straightforward. More advanced network disc imaging can take a bit to get down if you have never done it before. It still has a lot of non-graphical and more power-user type tools it requires.
 
i use my own image (OS/ Apps / Updates), create a boot image from the wim file from Win 7 (but now i use Win 8 wim files), then i create a "capture" image, and boot my newly made OS (with in a vm) once done, i boot PXE to the "capture" image and off i go, After i run sysprep on my new OS install that is as i have various hardware in our office from core 2 duo's to I3's to i5's and an i7 and some server gear (dell)
 
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