Thursday, February 25, 2016

Windows 10 Servicing options in ConfigMgr Current Branch

Within ConfigMgr Current Branch you can configure Windows 10 servicing. Microsoft added a nice new dashboard for that. Within the dashboard you can see the following functionality:
-Windows 10 Servicing (new dashboard)
-All Windows 10 Updates (upgrades available)
-Servicing Plans (ADR for CB and CBB, where CB means Current Branch, and CBB means Current Branch for Business)
 
On the dashboard you will see information like this:
This will tell you which Windows 10 versions are in use, and in which branch they are. There is also information about which versions will expire and when, and needs to be updated.
 
Just make sure to enable "Defer upgrades and updates" when you want to move systems from Release ready (CB) to Business ready (CBB). Business ready has a delay of 4 months on Release ready, which means one build. You can set a delay of 8 months on CBB, which means 12 months after CB release.

When creating a servicing plan (ADR for new Windows 10 builds) however, you need a lot of free disk space. In that case 256 builds are downloaded, which are around 2GB in size per build. That means approximately 512GB of space! They will be downloaded for Education, Enterprise and Professional. Just useless if you ask me :-)

For it seems it's better to download new Windows 10 builds yourself, and use the new upgrade task sequence with upgrade media to do the job. Hopefully (and I guess it will be) this functionality (decide which Windows 10 builds and versions are downloaded) will be available in a new ConfigMgr build. Otherwise the feature is useless..

Stay tuned for more information on this.

Source: Manage Windows as a service using System Center Configuration Manager

Update: get mentioned on twitter: That GPO setting (Defer upgrades and updates) is only for systems getting feature upgrades directly from WSUS or Windows Update, not when ConfigMgr is used.

On Microsoft TechNet however the following is mentioned: To see data in the Windows 10 servicing dashboard, you must do the following: Specify the group policy setting, Defer Upgrades and Updates, to determine whether a computer is CB or CBB. So I guess the GPO is needed as posted ;)

Update: 17-3 The following improvements were added in Configuration Manager 1602:
-New filter options are available for servicing plans that allow you to filter for Language, Required, and Title. Only upgrades that meet the specified criteria will be added to the associated deployment.
-When you select the Upgrades classification for software updates synchronization, a warning dialog is displayed to let you know that hotfix 3095113 for WSUS 4.0 is required before you can successfully synchronize software updates and for the Windows 10 Servicing to work properly. From the dialog, you can go to the associated knowledge base article.
-Available Windows 10 upgrades now only display in the Windows 10 Servicing \ All Windows 10 Updates node of the ConfigMgr console. These updates no longer display in the Software Updates \ All Software Updates node of the console.
-A servicing plan is considered a high-risk deployment, and the Select Collection window displays only the custom collections that meet the deployment verification settings that are configured in the site’s properties.
-End-users that start a Windows 10 Upgrade package will be prompted with a dialog that lets them know they will be upgrading their operating system.


So yes, Windows 10 Servicing is useful now ;)

Source: What's new in version 1602 of Configuration Manager

4 comments:

  1. Hi,

    thank you for this post. I just want to point out that it only downloads the selected languages, but it does download all versions of the language, which is wasted disk space like you mentioned

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hope that functionality works better in 1602, will let you know..

      Delete
  2. To get rid of that, specify a filter in Title with the language you don't want -en-gb if you want English, but not British English, for example.
    You might also want to put in -Pro, -Education and - N, if you only want Enterprise English (en-us)

    ReplyDelete
  3. hi,

    I have an issue.
    I upgraded to 2016 wsus and 3095113 is not applicable to server 2016.
    Windows servicing node is empty after sync.
    how to get the updates there?

    ReplyDelete