Reduce OSD Time

• I have seen several customer environments that had 8 or more restart steps in their TS. Whenever you have a restart in a TS you can assume usually 2 – 5 minutes are added to the total TS time. I would recommend investigating the status messages for exit codes indicating a restart is necessary before you start modifying a customers task sequence. Many of my peers usually have only 2 or 3 restarts in their TS as they have streamlined their deployments.
• MVP Mick Pletcher has a great post on how to handle restarts in your TS. Basically add a condition statement to check if the system needs a restart you can read about it and implement it here

• This will of course help you out on the install software update steps in your TS. The more patches that are in your WIM, the less to process later. I tend to bake office and patches into the WIM. I’m not a fan of having really thick images loaded with several 3rd party apps that can be installed during TS.
• Make sure you aren’t deploying a wim with multiple unnecessary Indexes. Read this article by my guy MIke Terrill on Putting your Indexes on a diet. Last year (Summer 2018) leveraged this for a customer in the past and saw time savings because of the reduced WIM. Starting in 1902 you can now import a single Index for your OS image, instead of all indexes that was part of the Media.
• We recommend to leverage OSDBuilder By David Segura for creating and servicing your WIM.
• Hopefully by now you are using OSDBuilder. BUT if you are not and you are offline servicing your WIM with configmgr you can now in 1902 start to remove superseded patches. So make sure you stay current on your SCCM ConfigMgr.

• This should be another no-brainier idea, but you will be surprised. I’ve seen customer environments where a machine from the east cost USA would pull down images from the middle east….like there is literally an entire ocean between the distribution point and the workstation..

• I’ve seen in the SMSTS.LOG before that a system I was imaging was trying to reach out to windows update. Some places you are confined to image from certain vlans only and you can block this communication at the firewall. In my TS I modify the Registry to prevent this action from occurring. Unfortunately this was something changed in my TS a long time ago so I did not grab a screenshot. I can edit this post when I get around to making the next revision of changes in the updated WIM. (Thanks Todd)

• Pre-Cache: This is how we are performing our in place upgrades. No more do we have to download content for each package being called, but we already have this stagged locally.
• Peer Cache: This is another way of getting content instead reaching out to the distribution piont you can contact a local cache source on your sub-net which may get the content faster.

• Historically if we wanted to run a powershell script we would have to create a package. I’ve seen other environments that have several scripts running during the task sequence, but they have multiple packages for different scripts, instead of everything consolidated into 1. With CurrentBranch 1902 you can run powershell scripts directly from the task sequence without first creating, and distributing a package. Make sure your clients are on 1902 version to make use of this feature.

Screenshot after changes OSD Time. We see below that this has been reduced to 36 minutes. I am positive I can actually get this to 32 minutes or less, but for now I will leave good enough alone. This test shows that we have cut the OSD time to less than 1/3 of the time. I’ve been in other environments where they had the image process take 24+ hours, but that is mainly boundary related issues. This does not include all of the possible time saving techniques such as per-staging the content (IPU Scenario)

Task Sequence Modifications

Power settings: I kind of have this littered everywhere in my TS before major time consuming steps like apply OS, install patches, install apps, etc.

Dynamic Variables: I have all my variables set here. These are for resiliency, and speed.

Prevent OOBE from Downloading Drivers:

Name: Mount the Offline HKLM File
Command Line: reg load HKLMOffline C:WindowsSystem32ConfigSoftware

Name: Set DODownloadMode
Command Line: REG ADD HKLMOfflineSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsDeliveryOptimization /v DODownloadMode /t REG_DWORD /d 100

Name: Set DoNotConnectToWindowsUpdate
Command Line: REG ADD HKLMOfflineSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsWindowsUpdate /v DoNotConnectToWindowsUpdateInternetLocations /t REG_DWORD /d 1

Name: Unmount the Offline HKLM File
Command Line: reg unload HKLMOffline

NOTE: 
This customer has unnecessary restarts in their OSD design, and were not very streamlined. Things in this version of the TS can be easily baked into the WIM on the next image refresh with the build/capture TS i provided for the customer. There are things that are slow during this TS like install Visual J+, or .Net Framework 3.5 that would reduce the total OSD time if baked into image. 

Other things to reduce OSD Time: 
I still have unnecessary install software update/restart steps in the TS as a sort of catch all. These systems come out fully patched, but are left enable in case I do not get time to capture and test a new wim one month. Stay on the latest version of ConfigMgr there are so many major enhancements coming out with every release!