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Surface Pro X and Pro 7 – SCCM deployment

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A few years back - an (ex) employee posted on the Adexis blog about the fun of Surface laptops and deployment in SCCM

https://blog.adexis.com.au/2018/04/09/microsoft-surface-laptops-and-sccm-os-deployment/#comment-1478

Personally, i've deployed a lot of Surface Pro 3's and 4's.... but not so much after that.... until now.

During the week i was called into a client to find out why their new Surface Pro devices were not PXE booting.

Once i attended site, had a look at the pxe log - and saw unsupported architecture... strange.... both the boot images are distributed and boot roms are correct...

Upon further investigation and google - i found that the devices were Surface Pro X's which are ARM based and not supported for deployment via SCCM or MDT.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm-app-management

the TLDR of the article is that the Surface Pro X is not an enterprise device.... the client managed to get devices replaced with Surface Pro 7's - and they actually got a refund, as the 7 was slightly less expensive than the X....

Onto the surface pro 7's....

These can be detected in the task sequence via a MWI query of

SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE Model = “Surface Pro 7"

Or by using the custom model variable from global conditions....

I prefer having one application with multiple deployments, each with a global condition of model.... this keeps the driver database less cluttered and is, for want of a better term, "neat".

Issue with this is that the Surface Pro 7 drivers install fine from the MSI, but kill the task sequence.... given the time restraints on this project, i didnt really have time to check... so i extracted the drivers from the MSI, imported them as drivers and allowed auto-apply to do its job.

TL;DR version of the whole article

  • Surface Pro X - no you cant deploy it via SCCM and yes it is shitty/confusing naming from MS
  • Surface Pro 7 - installing drivers via MSI will kill your task sequence - extract the drivers and install them as part of auto apply or apply drivers instead