Updating Dell Bios with ConfigMgr–Post 1–Creating Model based Collections

First Post of several leading up to deploying Bios Updates / Bios Settings to Dell machines using the Application Model of ConfigMgr

Update 10/12/16 – Don’t use “Like” in Collection Queries.  Since I wrote this post, I’ve gone back through and updated all the collection to use “equals”.  I’ve updated the post to reflect that improvement.

Update 7/18/16 – Found this post where @dhedges creates an app model deployment for Dell bios, but does it a bit different.  A good read to find which methods work best for your environment.

I’m going to break this topic up into several smaller posts, so they don’t become a huge Run-On.

• Post 1 – Creating the Collections to track down and target machines with Bios less than the Current Level
• Post 2 – Scripts Used to Update the Bios (Powershell or BatchFile, depending on your Environment)
• Post 3 – Creating the Application Deployment
  • Creating Global Conditions to make Hardware model a “requirement”
  • Creating Deployment Type per Hardware Model

 

Lets Start with Model Based Collections

Currently I have Collections setup for all Models, then Additional Collections based on which Bios Level they are at, so I can target ones with lower then the Current Bios level to deploy the bios updates to.

Lets look at a Query for a specific model first, it is quite simple:

select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name,SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM on SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.Model = “Latitude E6440”

This will generate a Collection with all of the Latitude E6440’s in our environment.

Now, to create a Collection based on Bios Version Level:

First, limit the collection to the model you’re dealing with:

For the Query, set it like this:

This is to ensure it has a client:

This is to ensure it’s not obsolete:

Now that you have your 2 collections, you should see something like this:

As you can see, I have 164 Latitude E6440 Laptops, and 153 of them are below the current Bios Level of A13. OUCH

After this Point, I did a lot of “Copying” collections, and slightly modifying them for each model, and bios level.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find this useful… I’ll try to post the next part early next week.