What's new in version 3.9

Become familiar with the new and changed features of this release.

OS Deployment version 3.9 includes the following new features:

You can specify target network configuration settings for bare metal deployments

You can specify both static and dynamic network configuration settings for targets in three different ways:

• In the bare metal profile.
• With the corresponding task (354).
• At the target computer with a dedicated user interface.

You can also specify a hostname rule for the targets of the deployment.

You can install or upgrade a Bare Metal server from the network, without previously uploading the corresponding installers from IBM Fix Central

In this release, you can automatically install the latest available version of the Bare Metal OS Deployment server directly from the network

New features for Linux deployments:

You can specify custom client settings during Linux Reimage and Bare Metal deployments

You can define custom client settings that can be used for running other tasks when deploying Linux targets.

Linux Partition editor in the Bare Metal Profile creation wizard simplifies partitioning.

You can specify partitions and logical volume layout (LVM) for Linux deployments for both BIOS and UEFI targets.

You can capture a Linux reference image for bare metal deployments

A new task is available to capture Linux images that you can use for bare metal deployments.

Linux Boot media

You can create Linux network boot media for targets that do not use PXE.

Multicast deployments

You can deploy Linux bare metal profiles using multicast for both captured and setup images.

New features for Windows Deployments

Windows 10 in-place upgrade

You can complete an in-place upgrade to Windows 10 of your existing Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Update your clients by using the corresponding task (202).

You can choose a BigFix Client version to be installed during a Bare Metal deployment of a manually captured Windows Image

If you are deploying a manually captured Windows image that does not contain a BigFix client, you can choose which version to install from the Wizard tab of the Bare Metal Profile. If the captured image already contains a BigFix client, the dashboard selection is ignored.

New tasks to capture and restore user state (USMT) on Windows targets, independently of deployments

Depending on the operating systems in your environment, two pairs of tasks are available. Captured data is stored on a network share. The tasks can be customized to include additional file extensions and content to be captured and restored on the target system.

For more information about new features, and for the list of fixed APARs in this release, see the BigFix wiki at this link: OS Deployment Release Notes