Kaviza / Citrix VDI-In-A-Box and the SCCM 2007 R3 Client

This will be a short post... mostly a big hooray for a worry-free sysprep in the Citrix VDI-In-A-Box product.

We just recently became an SCCM 2007 R3 shop, and in deploying clients, one of my biggest worries was sysprepping and the resultant chaos this has caused in the past to the SCCM client state. Microsoft's own official information states that there's a process for managing the SCCM client prior to imaging that can be quite time-consuming and detailed.

In our own testing, doing a normal install on the computer to be imaged, even including the site code and all other relevant features, seemed to work perfectly fine! Our golden image has been updated with the SCCM client for several weeks now, and has gone through several patch cycles and changes resulting in republishing. In every case, all of the desktop VMs report in and work great.

I'm not sure what else is running before or after the sysprep process in VDI-In-A-Box to handle the SCCM client configuration phase, but it sure seems to work well. My guess is that it's actually nothing... lots of other reports that I've found via Google state that there are no ill effects from a straight sysprep, and that the documentation in the article is incorrect.