OSDCloud – Image devices without need of infrastructure

Blog » OSDCloud – Image devices without need of infrastructure

Introduction

Have you ever been in a situation where you need to image or reimage your device? Of course, you have and so have I. Recently David Segura launched some awesome PowerShell code called OSDCloud. You might know him better for the Offline patching of images OSDBuilder, which has been on the market for quite some time.

OSDCloud is brand new and working without the need to build your own infrastructure.

How much does it cost; you may ask? Nothing, David spends his weekends for us to use it. It is free. You pay for your internet and that’s all.

This tool will deploy the OS until a state where you can onboard the device using Autopilot and finally be fully managed by Intune.

In this post I will demonstrate the steps you need to proceed with this awesome tool.

Requirements

Internet
ADK
USB (Only for physical devices)

Windows 10 1703+ to create the USB disk

Intune license

Table of Content

Install ADK
Create OSDCloud Workspace
Create ISO
Boot into WinPE
Cloud Image your device
Autopilot
Managing it with Intune

ADK

You can do this on your host machine but if you don’t like to spend 5 GB on installing ADK, then find a server or another device to do the following steps. Just be aware that the function to create USB drive will not work on a server OS.

Download ADK

Install the downloaded file

Adkwinpesetup.exe

Click Next

Click Accept

Click Install

Click Close

Download this one too

Double click adksetup.exe

Click Next, next, Accept

Click Install

Click Close

Create OSDCloud Workspace and ISO

Open PowerShell as admin

Install-Module -Name OSD -force

To build a more refined copy of ADK’s WinPE we will run this command.

New-OSDCloud.template -Verbose

Create a workspace for the binaries

New-OSDCloud.workspace -WorkspacePath E:OSDCloud

If we go to the workspace, we find the folders Autopilot and media. Let’s focus on how to get our Autopilot profile and locate it to the folder.

Let’s go and get those Autopilot profiles

$creds = Get-Credential

Insert your credentials (Intune admin)

(If you don’t have MSGraph installed yet you need to run Install-module Microsoft.Graph first)

Connect-MSGraph -Credential $creds

Get-AutopilotProfile | select displayname

Get-AutopilotProfile | Where-Object DisplayName -eq "Mindlab Production" | ConvertTo-AutopilotConfigurationJSON | Out-File -FilePath E:OSDCloudAutoPilotProfilesAutoPilotConfigurationFile.json -Encoding ASCII

Successfully downloaded the Autopilot JSON.

To get the Autopilot configuration file into the WinPe we need to edit that.

Edit-OSDCloud.winpe -WorkspacePath E:OSDCloud

If you need drivers in your PE image for supporting certain Network interfaces that can be done too. There are 2 commands at the moment.

The first one adds all WinPE drivers that exist for Dell, Nutanix and VMware.

Edit-OSDCloud.winpe -CloudDriver Dell,Nutanix,VMware

The second option is to choose your own drivers from a path

Edit-OSDCloud.winpe -DriverPath "E:OSDCloudDrivers"

Lastly we complete the ISO by building with all the elements we prepared.

New-OSDCloud.iso

And the result will look somewhat like this:

If you need to put it on a USB stick, make sure that it will be ok to erase what’s on it.

Simply run this command

New-OSDCloud.usb

Boot into PE and Cloud image your device

Start Hyper-v and create a new empty Virtual Machine.

Inside the virtual machine, PowerShell starts up.

Install-module -name OSD -force

Start-OSDCloud -OSEdition “Enterprise” -Culture “da-dk”

Press 1

Press A to confirm you will format the disk

After a while depending on your internet line, the device is ready to be rebooted. Mine took 13 minutes and 33 seconds.

Write exit

And on the CMD as well

Write exit

Autopilot

The device will reboot and start running some configurations. After a couple of minutes, you will see the known OOBE

It will reboot automatically once more and after that you will be presented with your company name.

Type your username

Type your password

Managing the device using Intune

First, we need to know the new name of the device.

Open a CMD

Type hostname

Go to https://endpoint.microsoft.com/

Devices -> Windows

We see our device joined Intune just fine. Now it is time to make sure our device will be converted to the Autopilot service, so next time we need to refresh Windows, this will be done without the need to reinstall the device.

Go to Groups

Press New Group

Give it a group name

Group description

Set membership to Dynamic device

Click Add dynamic variable.

Click Edit

Insert (device.enrollmentProfileName -eq "OfflineAutopilotprofile-08988bcd-1a6f-4102-878b-a713c4c9a2f1")

You can find it in the autopilot JSON file located in E:OSDCloudAutoPilotProfiles

Grab the ID and overwrite mine.

Save the group

And press Create

Wait some time and verify your device got into the group.

We verified our device came into the group. Very nice.

Go to Devices -> Enroll devices -> Deployment Profiles

Create profile -> Windows PC

Give it a name

Convert all targeted devices to autopilot set to yes

Press Next

My device should be a user driven Autopilot experience. Set settings as beneath.

Click next

Add groups

Select Autopilot – Cloud Devices JSON

Click Select and Next

Press create

Wait some time for the profile to target the device.

Go to devices -> Windows

Click on the device

Grab the Serial number

Go to Devices -> Enroll Devices -> Devices

Insert the serial number

We did it and got our device from scratch to fully managed by Intune and converted to Autopilot without ever touching the import script or hardware hash.

Summary

For companies that needs to start their cloud journey or just need a quick way of getting Windows reinstalled, OSDCloud is an excellent choice. No expensive bills and very fast to setup to use.

Happy Cloud OSD!

What is coming?

Lenovo and HP driver support direct downloads from vendor, so no need to provide driver packages and other stuff that takes up time.