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Troubleshooting Windows Deployments
I’ve been doing a session at various events over the years called “Troubleshooting Windows Deployments” or something similar to that. Today is the latest, presenting the session at TechEd New Zealand...
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Database changes in MDT 2012 and MDT 2012 Update 1
A few people have asked about the changes made in MDT 2012 and MDT 2012 Update 1 in regards to the MDT database. There aren’t that many changes, but here they are: MDT 2012 RTW Removed obsolete...
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Troubleshooting Windows Deployments, take #2
Traveling from New Zealand to Australia for the TechEd Australia conference, I had some additional time to work on the troubleshooting guide, which is now starting to feel more like a book. I added...
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Using the Windows Performance Toolkit
Inside the new Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) that was released back in August is a component called the Windows Performance Toolkit. I’ve talked about this at various events over the...
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MDT 2012 Update 1 has been updated
For those of you using ConfigMgr 2012, you may be interested in this. When ConfigMgr 2012 Cumulative Update 1 was released, it was discovered that you could no longer create a new task sequence using...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Roles and Features improvements
Apparently I was so wrapped up in the MDT 2012 Update 1 development process that I forgot to talk about one of the areas that consumed weeks of my time before the MDT 2012 Update 1 release:...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Deploy to VHD
I was working on a separate blog posting (to be posted soon) that referenced the “Deploy to VHD” support that was present in MDT 2012 and improved in MDT 2012 Update 1 and wanted to include a link to...
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Experimenting with a RAMdisk
One of the slow operations in the MDT Deployment Workbench is the initial “Update deployment share” process that has to completely generate new Lite Touch boot images. I always assumed that this was...
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More experimenting with RAMdisks: Using a VM completely in RAM
In my previous post, I talked about using a small RAMdisk to speed up the process of generating MDT boot images. But the trial version only supports RAMdisks up to 4GB in size and only on client OSes....
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Using boot from VHD and differencing disks
MDT 2012 includes a task sequence for deploying an operating system into a VHD, setting up the computer for booting from that VHD. See my previous blog posting about Deploy to VHD for more details on...
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User groups in the Seattle area
You would expect that having Microsoft in the Seattle area would result in having a plethora of Microsoft-related users groups around. But over the years, I’ve found that these are somewhat hard to...
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Sometimes it’s the little things…
I’ve been building SMS and ConfigMgr environments for over 17 years now. You would think that in that amount of time I would be able to do this without pulling my hair out. Most of the time that is...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Merged ZTI and UDI task sequences
Since we released MDT 2012 Update 1 Beta 1 a few weeks ago, I’ve received a few panicked e-mail messages from people asking “what happened to the UDI task sequence, it’s gone.” Don’t worry, it’s still...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Monitoring for ConfigMgr
In MDT 2012, we added support for DaRT integration into an MDT Lite Touch boot image, as well as a new monitoring feature that integrated with DaRT to make remote control into Windows PE easy. See...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Orchestrator support
Another new feature in MDT 2012 Update 1 is the ability to call System Center 2012 Orchestrator runbooks from within a task sequence. This works with Lite Touch deployments, ConfigMgr 2007, and...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Customer experience improvement program
If you have installed MDT 2012 Update 1 Beta 1, you might have noticed a new wizard page in the MSI installer:When enabled, this option enables us to collect more information about how MDT is being...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: UDI “Build Your Own Pages”
One of the challenges with previous versions of the UDI wizard was extensibility. With MDT 2010 Update 1, there was no way to add a new page. With MDT 2012, you could do this by writing C++ and C#...
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MDT 2012 Update 1 is coming soon!
You probably noticed that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 RTM’d today (see http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/08/01/windows-8-has-reached-the-rtm-milestone.aspx and...
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One journey ends, another begins
A long time ago, I worked in corporate IT. One day I started looking for new challenges and interviewed with Microsoft for a job in Microsoft Consulting Services, helping customers with their Windows...
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Displaying the task sequence name
I was talking to some people yesterday at the TechMentor conference in Redmond and about MDT, and somehow during the conversation I got a mental image of the task sequence progress dialog that I...
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