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r/sysadmin • … • u/SimplifyAndAddCoffee

Looking for simple and cheap replacement for MDT that isn't FOSS.

Yeah I know what you're thinking, why not FOSS? In short, our insurance policy mandates that we can only use closed source software from companies they can sue. No, I can't change our insurance policy/provider.

MDT was free and (mostly) worked... I really only need it to do one thing, which is capture and generalize images for deployment to new PCs. Our fleet is only like 200 PCs, but looking at the pricing for some of these "solutions" like snapdeploy and smartdeploy it's making me grit my teeth over how they can justify charging this much for something so basic. I don't need or want anything more than a replacement for sysprep.exe and I'll be damned if I'm gonna try and make a case for my boss to approve another $7k-$10k/yr expense for something so trivial. We're getting nickel and dimed to death by XaaS bullshit as it is and it's hurting my annual bonuses and salary adjustments.

Anyway ranting aside, what all have you found that works to put an OS on a baremetal PC with minimal cost, setup, infrastructure, and dependence on third party cloud providers?

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