This way, the user can control the timing of the large download and make sure they are on a “good” network and the download will not interfere with video conferences or other work. Mac App Store and/or System Preferencesįor some user-driven deployment styles, having the user download the InstallAssistant themselves can be part of the workflow. This approach is recommended and supported by Apple. The extra download will use a Caching Server. For certain deployment workflows, this is an acceptable or maybe even desireable trade-off. This has the advantage of being a fast initial installation of the InstallAssistant, but then the actual upgrade or re-installation process will take so much longer, because of the large extra download before the actual installation can even begin. Either workflow will trigger the download of the additional resources. It doesn’t matter whether the process is triggered by the user after opeing the application or by using the startosinstall or createinstallmedia tool. The additional resouces required for the actual system upgrade or installation which are GigaBytes worth of data will be loaded when they are needed. When you do this, the client will not get the full InstallAssistant application, but a ‘stub’ InstallAssistant. Since the “Install macOS Big Sur” application is available for free on the Mac App Store, you can use VPP to push it to a client from your MDM/management system. This was formerly known as “VPP” (Volume Purchase Program and I will continue to use that name, because “deploy with Apps and Books from Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager” is just unwieldly and I don’t care what Apple Marketing wants us to call it. When you have your MDM hooked up to Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager, you can push applications “purchased” in the “Apps and Books” area with MDM commands. Different management and deployment styles will require different solutions and approaches. Each with their own advantages and downsides, some supported and recommended by Apple and some… less so. You could further wrap and split the application in different containers, but that will increase the creation and deployment time. You can use Composer with Jamf to create a Jamf dmg style deployment, but that will only work with Jamf Pro. When you want to distribute the “Install macOS Big Sur” application to the clients in your fleet, either to upgrade or for an erase-and-install workflow, this limitation introduces some challenges. While a pkg file can be larger than 8GB, there are limitations in the installer package format which preclude individual files in the pkg payload to be larger than that. The reason for this failure is that the Big Sur installer application contains a single file Contents/SharedSupport/SharedSupport.dmg which is larger than 8GB. Pkgbuild: error: Cannot write package to "InstallBigSur20B29.pkg". Pkgbuild: Inferred install-location of /Applications Pkgbuild: Adding component at /Applications/Install macOS Big Sur.app/ With a Big Sur installer application this command will start working, but then fail: % pkgbuild -component "/Applications/Install macOS Big Sur.app/" InstallBigSur20B29.pkg This works for all InstallAssistants up to and including Catalina. You can use pkgbuild to build an installer package from an application, like this: pkgbuild -component "/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app" InstallCatalina-10.15.7.pkg Unfortunately, even though “app in a dmg” has been a means of distributing software on macOS for nearly 20 years, most management systems cannot deal with this and expect an installer package (pkg). If you are using Munki (or one of the management systems that has integrated Munki, like SimpleMDM or Workspace One) you can wrap the application in a dmg. And since the “Install macOS Big Sur” application is huge (>12GB) it poses its own set of challenges.ĭifferent management systems have different means of deploying software. Note: Apple calls the “Install macOS *” application “InstallAssistant.” I find this a useful shorthand and will use it.īefore you can use startosinstall, you need to somehow deploy the InstallAssitant on the client system. You can find this tool inside the “Install macOS Big Sur” application at: /Applications/Install macOS Big Sur.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall When you want to provide automated workflows to upgrade to or erase-install macOS Big Sur, you can use the startosinstall tool.
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