Author ArchiveI am enjoying my time at the SCCM 2007 TAP Airlift in Redmond with Dennis and Bannie. Today it is not so clouded, it is actually a nice sunny day so I can have one of my few cigarettes outside bacause of the smoking policy.. Inside the building I saw one of Microsoft’s charity projects so I took a picture. Hopefully you can see the make of this rack because the quality is really poor. Besides the rack they have a Sun box setup running Vista
Rob Lately I moved from VMWare Server to VMWare Workstation 6.0 beta which is great because you can copy files much easier, no need to copy files from ip-address to ip-address address, just copy and paste files to the virtual machines desktop. About two weeks ago in the US I experienced something strange. I was building a media deployment point in BDD 2007 Deployment WorkBench for a custom Vista image with applications and run out of disk space on my laptop which is strange because I use an external disk drive for my virtuals and I was absolutely sure to have something like 10GB free disk space, I checked disk space a couple of days before When I checked my free disk space now it was 900MB! So what else can you do besides cleaning… Empty the recycle bin, not much in it. Look at you temp folder in your profile, check the size, 9GB!!!!! WOW, do I serve as a public ftp server for the rest o the company or worse, the Internet? Then I looked at the “C:\Users\rmolenaar\AppData\Local\Temp\VMwareDnDâ€?  folder, some directories and one directory with my previous Media Deployment Point attempt inside (about 4GB). That one actually failed. I was sure about copying it just before I left the building but I did not see anything on my desktop when I was back in the hotel. The only thing I saw when I resumed from standby was a copying folder which I thought I did by accident so I closed it. What happens when you copy files from virtual machine to your desktop is that VMWare first copies all stuff to a temporary location and after that it copies the files to your desktop. So when you copy a 4GB Media Deployment Point you need 8GB disk space. Anyway when I came home I also saw that my deployment virtual machine size increased with quite a bit. So I looked in my temp folder on the virtual machine “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp\VMwareDnDâ€? and I saw the same thing. I don’t know if this is a beta issue but for all those VMWare 6.0 beta guys out there, check your temp folders when you move a lot of files from Physical to Virtuals and back just had a look at my MCP page and…. Yes another Vista certification  Microsoft Certification Status Credential Certification / Version Date Achieved It is a couple of days after the Exchange 2007 RTM party at Jeroen’s. Although quite late I still had the power to hit the spacebar and press F5 to find the BDD 2007 RC1 build on connect. So a short evaluation I started to do an uninstall of a TAP beta and install of the BDD 2007 RC1 bits. That looked alright but after a while I started to have problems. The task sequencer xml was updated and because it is a modified file an uninstall of BDD 2007 TAP beta leaves it behind in the build folder of the OS. So the best thing to do is start over… What I did so far…  I created a lite touch build with some core apps like Office 2007, Office communicator 2005 and the forefront client and deployed it WDS, works great. Then I started with some serious stuff ZTI. i created an OS image with only the sms client (you need it for ZTI) and started to configure ZTI. One of the most interested things is the way BDD 2007 handles drivers. You can configure driver groups (to handle 32 and 64 bit drivers). This is necessary because some vendors do not build their inf’s correct. What happens at deployment time is that the BDD scripts check the pnp id’s of the available devices and compare these with available drivers and driver groups on the network. If there is something to use the scripts copy only the necessary drivers! The other nice feature is that almost all configuration of BDD 2007 is stored in a handful of xml files so migrating them over to a newer version is easy. Anyway, with some struggling because of naming conventions I managed to do a ZTI of XP SP2 and refresh that OS to Vista RTM with office. Other features I tested was dynamic packages, role based packages and make model packages. Dynamic packages is the best, you just drop an image on a machine and at the state restore sequence it start installing previous installed programs based on a stored procedure and some lookups in the SMS DB add/remove programs view of the previous OS. I have to admit I used our own inhouse developed DB tool. Try it yourself, deployment hasn’t been that easy Rob Interesting new MS site about Windows Vista and Office Professional and free licenses, but you have to work for it http://www.powertogether.com/ cheers Rob |
|
Powered by WordPress, Mandigo theme by tom.
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
41 queries. 0.511 seconds.
