SCCM Offline Servicing - broken forever

Question

Image creation problem in SCCM today.

Today, I used the Media Creation Tool to create a Windows 10 x64 21H2 iso. I used DISM to convert the install.esd to install.wim and imported into SCCM.

I ran Offline Servicing and selected 64 bit, unchecked everything that was checked, and filtered for for just 21H2. 3 updates were left, of which 2 were .Net and 1 was the March Cumulative. I understand why the .Net ones failed since I did not add .net to the wim, but why did the cumulative fail?

I have not had Offline Servicing work in a very long time. I even did the DISM updates to my 21H1 image and it’s keeps failing to do Offline Servicing as well. This used to be super easy to do. What am I doing wrong or what changed?

Also, since when do we need to install VC Redistributable to a base image before we can run the Capture task sequence created from the capture media in the SCCM console? I don’t remember ever having to do that before. I usually load a Hyper V with Windows 10 whatever flavor, make like 3 reg changes (Cortana, animation, and check marks) install .Net 3.5 and then disable networking, mount the capture iso and then capture the wim, upload and away I go. I kept getting errors related something missing that was only fixed when I installed VC Redistributable. Then the capture task failed. I have like one more Windows image to capture before hopefully before moving to Autopilot. Would have been great if anything worked.

Answer 1

Well I can't comment on your capturing troubles because I haven't used the capture process in a long time. It just doesn't fit in the WaaS model. The actions you are performing as part of the capture process can easily be handled using TS steps.

As for the servicing issue, did you check offlineservicing log to see why the injection of the update is failing?

Answer 2

I think the problem with the cumulative MSU pack, that it tries to also install the Servicing stack. And it fails. You can extract the servicing stack CAB and the Cumulative pack and offline service them separately. They can even go in one move but fist should be the servicing stack, then the cumulative. Also, time-to-time, there is 1 or 2 independent little security patch MSU which is also required to be offline serviced to the image.

Answer 3

We have submitted this exact question regarding offline servicing of Windows 11 (UUP patch) to our Microsoft Technical Account Manager. It appears per this article it is no longer supported.

I'm starting to believe that moving forward we'll need to monthly replace the source Windows 11 image in SCCM with the latest image from the Microsoft Volume License or Visual Studio site.