Deployment Solution

From the HF7 release notes "The Power control Reboot to production environment command times out while attempting to reboot a client computer in WinPE automation environment"

is that for machines in PXE or only local automation folders?  This will keep me from upgrading if I'm understanding correctly.  All of our imaging jobs reboot to production and then finish sysprep, etc.

Support is saying I should use the "Boot To" task and select either "Production" or "Automation" as needed" - which is what I use.

They said the 'Power control - restart' command that has issues.

Can anyone confirm if the 'boot to production' tasks are working for them on HF7?  We rely on these for imaging to work correctly.  If it's the power control/restart that's broken, I think the docs should be reworded maybe.

For anyone interested, support called back and assured me the 'reboot to production' tasks would be fine and only Power control tasks are effected.

Before HF7, the 'Power control' tasks did not work at all in automation.  In HF7, the ability to use 'Power control-shutdown' in automation was added.  This is new functionality. 

The 'Boot to' tasks have not changed (they are DS tasks while power control are core tasks) and it there are any problems with them please contact support.

-Doug

Thanks for responding, Doug.  I upgraded today and so far so good with 'reboot to' tasks like you said.

So far my smoothest upgrade yet (knock on wood).  The only thing I think I have found that I lost was my 're-deployment' menu was cleared out under settings - initial deployment.  Luckily easy to rebuild that.

My only big remaining wish with Deployment Solution now is I wish the agent upgrade process was smoother after upgrading the server.  It seems like we are still supposed to rebuild base images after upgrading to avoid the agent from blinking during post image tasks which can cause them to fail.

It's not a huge deal for us, as we are mostly hardware independent, so it's just updating one image, but there are some lab images we have that we rarely used that I don't have much desire to update beyond the yearly cycle we have on them.  I am thinking to have techs call me if they need to image one and I'll disable the client update until the image is completed or something.

Sally, I have the same issue with always having to re-pack my images for the new agent, but on the last two upgrades I found that my post-image tasks continued to fire off even with the agent upgrade tasks trucking away, as well.

My example was on the Surface 3 Pro tablet. Typically a pain to prep one of those due to the partition layout, etc, but I went ahead an imaged a few as a test with the old 7.5 SP1 HF5 agent still on them and now with my infrastructure on 7.6 HF6 they imaged, ran all of their post-image tasks (and there were a ton) and also performed agent upgrades in th emiddle of all that. Not one of them failed and the image completed. 3 tablets in a row. I expected them to fail!

You might want to see if your tasks are resilient like mine were.

Prior to the issue of the Boot to command being fixed, I just used a Run Script task in my job to reboot the computer.

In the Run Script task, I selected command script and in the body, it was simply "shutdown /r /f"