Now Available: An Update for the System Center Configuration Manager Upgrade Assessment Tool
Published Oct 16 2018 08:28 PM 7,083 Views
Microsoft
First published on CLOUDBLOGS on Mar 31, 2016
Author: Chaohao Xu, Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise Client and Mobility

We are pleased to announce that the System Center Configuration Manager Upgrade Assessment Tool (UAT) has been updated to support Windows 10 and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center here .

The Upgrade Assessment Tool (UAT) is a feature add-on to System Center Configuration Manager and the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) that provides administrative users with information that they can use to determine whether computers that are managed by Configuration Manager can run Windows 10 or earlier versions of Windows.

The Upgrade Assessment Tool provides the following functionality:

  • Retrieves device driver compatibility information for installed peripheral devices and creates reports that you can use to determine which device drivers need to be upgraded to support the Windows operating system.

  • Allows you to see which computers meet the recommended system requirements for Windows operating systems and to customize these requirements for your environments.

  • Creates summary reports that you can use to see an enterprise wide view of operating system upgrade readiness.

  • Allows you to create dynamic collections for an operating system deployment. The collection query rules can be based on system requirements, application compatibility status, and device driver status.


Next I will show how you can use Configuration Manager with the Upgrade Assessment Tool to assess your environment for Windows 10 readiness.

Install and Configure ACT and UAT


Follow the instructions in the Topic How to Install and Configure the Upgrade Assessment Tool to install and configure the Upgrade Assessment Tool. The main steps are:

  1. Configure the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 6.1

  2. Create and deploy a data-collection package

  3. Install and configure the Upgrade Assessment Tool

  4. Perform Upgrade Assessment Tool synchronization


When you have completed the first synchronization, you can start assessing the computers in your environment for upgrade readiness for Windows 10.

Configure System Requirements for Windows 10


First configure the recommended system requirements for Windows 10 32-Bit or 64-Bit in your enterprise. The defaults are the published recommended system requirements of 1GHz CPU, 4GB Memory and 16GB Hard disk. The Upgrade Assessment Tool uses this criteria to evaluate whether machines are capable of meeting the recommended system requirement for Windows 10. You may change these to your own organization’s specifications. For example, you may set the memory to 8G, or hard disk drive to 50G.



Analyze your Environment for Windows 10 readiness using the Upgrade Assessment Reports


Next look at the “ Upgrade assessment summary report, which gives an overview of the assessment for upgrading to a specific operating system in terms of Application Compatibility, Hardware Device Status and Operating System Requirement Status. Our example below uses Windows 10 32-Bit as the operating system.




You can drill down into the report to see more details about the issues.  For example, if I drill down on the Operating System Requirement Status, which has 6 Major Issues, it takes me to the report “ Operating system requirement status for comp uters in a specific collection ”.




Here it lists all 6 machines with the issue, and we see that they all do not meet the minimum memory requirement for Windows 10 32-Bit which is set for 4 GB.

Going back to the summary report, if I drilled down to the 2 unknown status in the Hardware Device Status pie chart, it would take me to the “ Hardware device status summary ” report.




This report lists all the hardware devices with a driver that has an “unknown” compatibility status for Windows 10 32-Bit.  The report also tells you how many machines have this device.

If I click on “ Microsoft IPv4 IPv6 Transition Adapter Bus ” in the report, it then will tell me which 6 machine have this device installed.




One way to remediate this particular issue, is to find a working driver for this device for Windows 10 32-bit. And import that driver into the OSD Drive catalog. When the next sync is due, Upgrade Assessment Tool will search for the driver and re-evaluate the device status based on the new driver information. A status of “Available in Catalog” will be given to the device. Note: Upgrade assessment only runs this re-evaluation if the device’s original status for a target OS is something other than “Available Inbox”.

Create customized collections that are Windows 10 ready


Finally you can use the "Create Device Collection" wizard to create a collection that will automatically add machines that meets the upgrade assessment criteria.  You can target a Windows 10 OSD task sequence to that collection.

An example of a collection query is:







This query adds machines that have a hardware device status <= 2, i.e. have Window 10 32-bit or Windows 10 64-bit compatible drivers that are either “Available Inbox” or “Available In Catalog”.

Similar queries can be authored for “App My Rating” and “System Requirement Rating”.  For more information about using the Upgrade Assessment System class and its attributes to create queries see the How to Create Collections for the Upgrade Assessment Tool topic.

Summary


I hope this overview of the reporting and query functionality available with the Upgrade Assessment Tool helps you with your Windows 10 deployments.  For more information please see the Configuration Manager Upgrade Assessment Tool User Guide .  We would appreciate hearing what you think about this tool.  To provide feedback or report any issues with the functionality, please use Connect .  If there’s a new feature or enhancement you want us to consider including in future updates, please use the Configuration Manager UserVoice site .

- Chaohao Xu

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