By
Johan Arwidmark
/ January 11, 2024
When creating ConfigMgr task sequences you learn that ConfigMgr assigns different types to them. This type is available as the _SMSTSType task sequence variable during deployment, and also available in the ConfigMgr database, as the TS_Type column in the vSMS_TaskSequencePackage view. The values are:
- 1: A generic task sequence
- 2: An OS deployment task sequence
Credits: Thanks to Boushev Gleb for the initial find
But what really determines how a Task Sequence gets tagged with 1 or 2? Well, the task sequence will set to type 2 (OSD) if it has any of the following actions:
- General / Join Domain or Workgroup
- General / Restart Computer (configured for restarting into “The boot image assigned to this task sequence”)
- Disks / Format and Partition Disk
- User State / Request State Store
- User State / Release State Store
- Images / Apply Operating System Image
- Images / Setup Windows and ConfigMgr
Note: At least the Restart Computer action can be configured the right way, and be disabled, the task sequence will stil be flagged as an OSD type task sequence.
Thats the What, what about the why? 1 or 2?
Great question!
The type is there to allow you to easily filter on task sequences; for example, in OSD Frontends, you only want to see task sequences that can deploy an image. Not generic application task sequences.
I just ran into a why for this last week and found this article after I figured it out and searched for a list of possible steps to include to make a task sequence type 2. In our environment, we have multiple x64 boot images because of driver conflicts. To avoid having to maintain multiple task sequences with all the same steps, we have a task sequence for each boot image and inside they each have one step which is Run Task Sequence which contains the task sequence with all of our OSD steps. In this scenario, all the steps… Read more »
Thanks for the update!