Has anyone got any experience with deploying SCCM Clients in a DeepFreeze protected environment? For those that don't know, DeepFreeze is a product that removes all changes made to the hardisk at reboot, similar to GoBack and Microsoft Steady State if you've heard of them. http://www.faronics.com/html/deepfreeze.asp Obviously I'm aware the devices will need "Thaw'ing" to allow deployment of the clients but what happens to things like policies or distribution cache's when DeepFreeze wipes out changes upon reboot? I have the option of creating a "Thaw Space" which creates a drive say "T:\" that allows files to be written to it and not wiped out. Is there anyway to rediect the installation of the sccm client to that drive? Thanks in advance, SB

I think I may have answered my own question CCMSetup.exe CCMINSTALLDIR="T:\SCCM" SMSCACHEDIR="T:\SCCM\Cache" The only thing is now... how do I get that running as part of the automated push install.

And now i've worked that one out too Set the switches via Client Push Installation Properties: Client Tab. I'd best finish reading next time instead of panic posting! Feel free to confim or correct my ramblings though please! Cheers, SB

Well, I have zero knowledge of any of those products you mention. However, you can set the command line parameters on the Client tabof the Client Push Installation Properties, and those are the parameters we'll then use on a push, and if you are using an AD extended for Configuration Manager (and publishing to AD), then for any other install method when you run ccmsetup.exe without any switches. So, if those work for your DeepFreeze environment, then that should work with the push properties.

Hi Stevyb69, I hope you're still around. I was wanting to know how you got on with using SCCM and DeepFreeze. We use DF in our College, and I'm looking to deploy SCCM. Do all of the features work with DeepFreeze (Software Metering, Aset intelligence, etc), obviously the PCs will need to be thawed for updates and SW delivery. Why did you install the client to the thawed partition, did it provide additional benefits? It will be good to hear about your experiences. LaszloPuskas

Hi Stevyb69, I hope you're still around. I was wanting to know how you got on with using SCCM and DeepFreeze. We use DF in our College, and I'm looking to deploy SCCM. Do all of the features work with DeepFreeze (Software Metering, Aset intelligence, etc), obviously the PCs will need to be thawed for updates and SW delivery. Why did you install the client to the thawed partition, did it provide additional benefits? It will be good to hear about your experiences. LaszloPuskas If you do not install to the thaw partition, your reports for hardware inventory will not be correct. Since the file will get wiped everytime the machine gets rebooted. This will have a large impact if you upgrade to the R3 release for power management. Thanks, Ross

Hi Guys, Nice thread resurection ;) We currently have around 300 devices with DeepFreeze and SCCM installed, and it works brilliantly. What we ended up doing was installing the SCCM Client on the C Drive (Drive that is protected by DeepFreeze) but moved the cache to a D Partition so that we could always ensure it didn't get wiped at reboot. We then changed the Inventory and Update schedules to match the DeepFreeze maintentance windows, as well as setting a SCCM Maint window to match it, ensuring that hardware inventory, software deployment and software updates only ever ran while the device was "Thawed". One major thing to point out is that trying to get SCCM to use a "Thaw" drive within DeepFreeze (Usually T: ) for the cache or even an install location wouldn't work. We had to use a physical partition and told DeepFreeze not to protect it. We set the BIOS to wake up just before the DeepFreeze/SCCM Maint windows every night and have a really good working system where it's fully protected during the day and then locked and auto updated/maintained during the night. Hope this helps! Cheers, SBMy System Center Blog

Workaround for this here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrsetup/thread/0e9b6cb9-181b-420f-89f1-d7714c7ac7a9. Thanks, Ross

I've also been testing with moving the CfgMgr client cache location (because we have thousands of machines under the effects of DeepFreeze) and I ran across this thread, which has some great information but I may be missing something. In my testing I've been able to successfully redirect the cache location in my test environment and packages configured to download locally and run DO get downloaded to the redirect cache location on the "thawed" T:\ Drive and successfully install from there. However, I've watched carefully to see whether machine reboots cause the data to be re-downloaded once the machine again obtains it's policy and notification that it has a mandatory app to run, and I notice that the contents of the package folder that was originally downloaded still ends up getting wiped and re-downloaded. (Yes this is a "thawed" drive and the package data does persist on a reboot, it is just being wiped when CfgMgr begins to re-download the package data.) Steve, According to your notes above this is not happening on your workstations; did you do something differently? The only way around this I can see might be to re-install the CfgMgr client completely onto the thawed drive (T:\). Thanks in advance for any insight on this.