Dealing with Windows 10 version 1709 and its VL multi-edition package on the KACE SDA
You might notice that there have been some packaging changes with volume licensing media and upgrade packages with Windows 10, version 1709. Now, instead of having separate media and packages for Windows 10 Pro (volume licensing version), Windows 10 Enterprise, and Windows 10 Education, all three are bundled together.
You may notice this most when you try to deploy 1709 with the same Setup Configuration (unattended/answer file) that worked for version 1703. Your automated OS installs will halt and present the UI screen which asks you to choose which edition of Windows 10 you'd like to install. So how do you get back to full automation? We now need to tell Windows Setup the index number of the Windows edition in the Setup Configuration. I'll caveat this guidance with "Quest may enhance a future release that removes this necessity".
Image Name | Index |
Windows 10 Education | 1 |
Windows 10 Education N | 2 |
Windows 10 Enterprise | 3 |
Windows 10 Enterprise N | 4 |
Windows 10 Pro | 5 |
Windows 10 Pro N | 6 |
Table 1 (Source: TechNet Blog Oct 13, 2017)
You need to edit your Setup Configuration at the ImageInstall OSImage section and you add an InstallFrom MetaData key value pair. Here is an example:
<ImageInstall>
<OSImage>
<InstallFrom>
<MetaData wcm:action="add">
<Key>/IMAGE/INDEX</Key>
<Value>1</Value>
</MetaData>
</InstallFrom>
...
</OSImage>
</ImageInstall>
The value shown above, 1, tells Windows Setup to select the "Windows 10 Education" image for installation. You would obviously replace this value with the index number of the edition you're interested in installing. The ellipsis there simply depicts that you may have other attributes in this section but the focus for this tip is to select the install image/edition of Windows.
Setup Type: Legacy Setup with command line support
Deployment Method Used: Vendor Provided Command Line (answer file driven)
Deployment Difficulty:
unspecified
Platform(s): Windows
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612867(v=ws.11).aspx
i.e. if the Windows setup wizard reads this key from the unattended.xml
NW6C2-QMPVW-D7KKK-3GKT6-VCFB2
It will pick automatically Win 10 Education - Channeler 6 years ago