Tuesday 5 March 2013

ConfigMgr 2012 / SCCM 2012 SP1 Step by Step Guide Part 27: Wake on LAN

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Part 27 describes the Wake on LAN functionality of Config Mgr 2012. 

Wake on LAN is easy to configure in Config Mgr  However, in reality, it can be a lot more difficult to achieve the full functionality across your entire infrastructure. It can be very frustrating to implement.

The basic steps are:

1. Configure Config Mgr
2. Ensure clients are configured correctly
3. Enable WOL for deployments

1. WOL is enabled in the Site Properties as shown




Tick the box to "Enable Wake on LAN for the site"



A dialog box appears to say that an Out of Band Management Point has not been configured. We are not concerned with AMT (Active Management Technology) at the moment so we can disregard.


Select "Use wake-up packets only". 

Select Subnet-directed broadcast or Unicast (see below for explanation of this)

2. BIOS and NIC of the client computer must support WOL. 

The BIOS may not allow WOL by default so this should be configured. 

Required NIC settings are shown below (most NICs are already configured by default)






3. WOL can then be enabled as you deploy the following to a collection

Operating System Deployments
Software Distribution
Software Updates



This example uses WOL while deploying Software Updates

Networking

The steps above are really straightforward and work really well for local subnets. However it is not as easy to achieve success on remote subnets.

Unicast uses the MAC address and IP address of the target client to route the WOL packet to the target's subnet. Config Mgr learns the IP address from the client's hardware inventory.

Subnet-directed broadcasts use the MAC address and IP subnet address of the target client. Config Mgr learns the subnet from hardware inventory.

Both these methods rely on the accuracy of the IP information in the hardware inventory. Also, in the case of Subnet-directed broadcasts, the routers between subnets must be configured to allow them.

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