Deploying Mac OS Installers from VPP

[kbreed27]

Does anyone know if deploying the Mac OS installer through VPP speeds up MDM command updates or if it assists with speeding up the legendary Graham Pugh Erase/Install script? 

Keeping Mac OS up to date though management is a pain the neck. Our MDM commands for updates seem to be *mostly* reliable, but for the ones we need to force through manual user intervention, I'm wondering if scoping out the VPP app for the Erase/Install script helps it run any faster? I know it's just a small stub file, but I'm wondering if it's deployed through VPP if it will force the computer to look at our in-network Apple Caching servers. 

Sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to wrap my head around Mac OS updates. 

Thanks!

[sdagley]

@kbreed27 No, the VPP installers aren't what you want for the MDM updates. I'd definitely recommend letting erase-install do the download as it will display a progress indicator.

[grahamrpugh]

I don't recommend it. I'm not sure the VPP-sourced installer is still a stub file, but when it was, the total time to install from it was far longer than if you downloaded the full installer. 

Probably the fastest way is to use the --fetch-full-installer option and use a caching server (though this is less reliable than the normal option that uses Mist). Or upload the installer to Jamf but that's a lot more work - and not necessarily faster; depends on the relative connection speeds of your Jamf server, Apple's servers, and wherever your clients are. 

[kbreed27]

Thank you for the response and all your time on the erase/install pkg. It makes it much easier for  us to direct the end user to run their own updates when MDM commands fail (which is way more often than I'd like).

All of our JAMF Pro instance is hosted on-prem and being K-12 Education 99% of our devices stay on our internal network about 98% of the time.  I was hoping to use something that is simple for the end user to interact with but also have it pair with our internal resources. 

[AJPinto]

If you wanted to pre-download the macOS installer for some reason, I recommend packing and deploying it. You can package install macOS xyz.app as a .dmg and deploy it that way. Just keep in mind the .app is massive, and will take quite some time to download and install. However when launched it still needs to handle the cryptography stuff on the device, so its not an "instant" solution. 

[sdagley]

No need to waste time re-packaging the macOS installers as a .dmg, just download the InstallAssistant.pkg for the version you want from Apple. Links for each version can be found on Mr. Macintosh's web site, and here are the links for the macOS Ventura installers: https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-ventura-13-full-installer-database-download-directly-from-apple/