SCEP 2012 and VDI offline servicing

Question

I've seen this question being asked before in another thread (Best practice to run Microsoft Endpoint Protection client in VDI environment) however the answer doesn't provide enough information (for me at least)
We are planning to use a Citrix XenDesktop environment with Provisioning services providing VDI clients. As far as I know the SCCM client will be installed in the VDI golden image and after some adjustments SCCM client registration will go well. We will
also use SCCM 2012 and deploy SCEP 2012 for anti-malware scanning.
SCCM 2012 provides offline servicing for Software Updates in WIM images, but what is a best practice in keeping the VDI's up-to-date? I can't find any good information about this, so maybe the answer is very simple?... Is there a way to offline service the
VDI image so Software Updates and Anti-Malware updates are injected in the image?
Or do the VDI's get updated as physical systems, at the time they are logged in to the network, discarding all changes when logging off. This doesn't seem the right way to go.
Any help would be appreciated.
thx. Niels

Answer 1

I struggled with this same problem for a while, and likewise didn't find a great answer anywhere. In our case, this is for an RDS VDI environment, but the solution I ended up employing should work anywhere.
First, set up SCCM/WSUS to download the updates to a UNC share (if you haven't already; here's a helpful guide:
http://blog.thesysadmins.co.uk/sccm-2012-scep-unc-definition-updates-automation-powershell.html). Also, create an antimalware policy for the VDI machines with the definition updates source set to UNC only, and set the UNC Path section accordingly.
Here's the key part: create a scheduled task in your master image to run based on boot or resume (RDS puts the VDI VMs in a Saved state rather than Off). Here are the settings I used for the task:
General tab: I set it to run as the SCCM Network Access Account; Run whether user is logged on or not
Triggers tab: Begin the task On an event; Basic; Log: System; Source: Kernel-General; Event ID: 1 (this pops up on a startup or resume event); Delay task for: 5 minutes (during VM creation, it boots the machine for just a couple minutes, and I
didn't want this task to be interrupted by a shutdown halfway through); Enabled
Actions tab: Action: Start a program; Program/script: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\MpCmdRun.exe"; Add arguments: -SignatureUpdate
I left the other tabs with their defaults
In RDS, the VMs on creation are spun up briefly and then put into a Saved state. It then spins up just a few, waiting for users to connect. By the time a user logs in, the machine should have the latest updates, but even if it doesn't, it should be
no more than ~5 minutes before it does.
Hope this helps!
Ryan