Hi, wondering if anyone can suggest some best practices for OS deployments. Currently I have an automated process which creates a virtual machine as an empty base from template, imports that machine into sccm, joins the collection associated with my server build TS and PXE does the rest.

The biggest issue with the above approach is that my image file which gets downloaded to the machine as part of the TS is about 5GB and takes about 10-20 minutes to copy.    Wondering if I should move that image file into the VM template instead.  The benefit is to reduce deployment time, but has a few draw backs as well.     

Can anyone provide some articles on this and potentially good implementation steps they followed to accomplish this?

Thank You.

People can't wait that long?

I don't think the question is if people can wait or not.    It was more about what is the best approaches for these deployments.

Well you could create a Stand Alone media and have it reside on the VM storage so they could just use this instead.

But any option of creating or copying the content of the TS as some huge drawback. Each time you will want to change something in the TS a super small option you will need to redo the other process of copying or creating the media.

I don't think there is a "best approach here" it's a matter of what you need for you environment.

If the Drawback back of creating a media don't outweigh the drawback of waiting 15 min than go for it.

But reading what you are trying to do you want to move the WIM into the VM ? not sure how you will do this as the TS will apply a wim from SCCM. 

I would use either a stand alone media (contains all the ts locally) or maybe do a prestaged media after that clone the VM see if this work.

But like Torsten said if people can'T wait 15 min maybe build the computer before hands.

 

Worth trying this also if time is an issue :

http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2015/03/27/reducing-windows-deployment-time-using-power-management.aspx

I've seen improvement on some models and none on others, so maybe it will help you deploy faster.