Introduction
In Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 operating system deployment (OSD), there is a limitation of 4MB for task sequence XML data. This is discussed in a couple of locations:
- http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/configmgrosd/thread/6C4A4BB2-847B-4290-878C-3E041D9B3FD2
- http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/smslist/archive/2009/10/08/mssms-maximum-number-of-steps-in-an-sccm-task-sequence.aspx – Jason Sandys (ConfigMgr MVP) references the link below
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb932192.aspx
The Technet document linked to above says the following:
Extremely large task sequences can exceed the 4-MB limit for the task sequence file size. If this limit is exceeded, an error is generated.
Solution: To check the task sequence file size, export the task sequence to a known location and check the size of the resulting .xml file.
Basically, the Technet troubleshooting article is suggesting that you would need to go into the ConfigMgr console, right-click a task sequence, export it to a XML file, and then pull up the file properties. That’s fine for one-off troubleshooting, but what if you had 1000 task sequences and needed to know how large all of them were? Read on to find out how!
