Category: SCCM

SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007 Side By Side Migration

I want to share a recent migration experience I had from SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007 SP2 R2 with you all, some of the situations I encountered and what I did to remedy them. I relied heavily on the SCCM technet documentation which is linked on my side bar. Open for conversation are any possible improvements or any other ways you would have performed the migration.

Because nobody wants to die of boredom while reading this post, I will borrow a quote from Inigo Montoya: “Let me splain…there is too much…let me sum up”.

The environment in question was a single site SMS 2003 site with approximately 4500 users and 3400 computers. The upgrade was performed side by side, meaning that the installation of the SCCM server and site was done while SMS 2003 was still an active site. I’d like highlight some of the things I would have done differently if I could have done it again.

Client Deployment

I created a package for the SCCM client in SMS 2003 and deployed it to all SMS 2003 clients. If I could go back, I would have simply enabled client push for workstations and migrated boundaries. I ended up enabling it after all the clients were deployed, and it proved to be a very reliable source of client installation.

Remote Control

With the changes that came about in regards the Remote Control portion of the software from SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007, I wish I had made it more clear to the users of the remote control software what changes and new limitations were going to be imposed. No more “Send CTRL+ALT+DEL”, and a dual monitor bug that they’re not addressing until v.Next were 2 of the biggest complaints.

Package Migration

I used the free 1E package migration utility to migrate several of the packages from SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007. Initial testing only proved successful for more than half the packages for normal deployments or deployments during OSD. We ended up re-creating more than half of the imported packages by hand. If the environment had been used more extensively, I would have created a secondary site server in the SMS 2003 site, made it a child site in the new SCCM 2007 site, then either upgraded it using the SCCM console, or the setup wizard to preserve package quality.

There are more, but that’s all I can think of at the moment. Next on my agenda is the migration from WSUS to SCCM for update deployment.

VBScript to name computers during OSD

Determining a computer name during an imaging process has always proved to be a challenge. One of my favorite methods is to utilize WMI to obtain the serial number of the computer that is being imaged. This way, if all your hardware is from a particular vendor, Dell, HP, Panasonic, you can guarantee that no two computer names will ever be the same and you can name them automatically during the imaging process. Not to mention you can quickly look up the computer information on the vendor website.

The following vbscript I wrote will determine the serial number, append a “C” to the front of it, then populate the OSD task sequence variable called “OSDComputerName”. It is one of the first tasks in all my task sequences. One of the extras I wrote in will actually prompt you to enter the computer name if it detects it is a VMware, Citrix or Microsoft Virtual machine, because they do not have a serial number in WMI. Enjoy!

GetComputerName.txt

Just rename to .vbs