Acronis Snap Deploy Licensing

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Gwenda Arguin

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:11:23 PM8/3/24

to conslambburse

I was mainly the person involved in setting up the WDS, and I originally had a golden/master image created in VM Workstation just so I could load up a snapshot if I made mistakes and would recapture/resysprep.

The goal here was when Microsoft released new builds of windows 10 I thought I could load a snapshot of the VM back to before I captured it, and load up the latest build but I found that this was not the case, and had issues here.

Ended up opting to just use the WDS to install windows 10 as provided from Microsoft, and then have staff follow an SoE/SoP (Standard Operating System as Acronis calls it). We essentially had an internal SoE/SoP that we would use as the standard for any endpoint machine going out for any client unless that client had their own SoE/SoP that needed to be followed instead. (So no re-imaging never actually took place here, we just used the WDS to boot an official windows 10 image, rather than make bootable media)

All system prep is done in our workshop, and then taken onsite to either be joined to a domain and have group policies applied for final configuration, or to small companies only on a workgroup and then further manual configuration takes place.

According to the KB articles from Acronis, if you use their capture tool you really do not need to sys prep windows 10 anymore, is there any more to this, or is it really not required now? (If sys prep is not really required, this Is handy because I hated having to muck around with an unattended.xml file when I tried using WDS to configure certain windows settings that would not stay after syspreps.)

In the Master/Golden image, can I install any program I want or is it recommended to only install programs using the profile section during deployment, as I guess certain applications could become end of life, and then they would essentially pollute that Master image?

The simple thing is if you are reselling PCs or lappy using OEM or retail OS licenses, you are not allowed to deploy the OS using images. Then you should know that most manufactures OEM source or media kit usually contains the manufacturer data (trademarks, browser branding etc) and it is 100% not legal to use it on other brands and/or to sell or distribute copies of the OEM media as well (unless it came with the hardware).