Small workaround when Clear PXE advertisements doesn’t seem to work
I find it very annoying that sometimes when I clear an PXE Advertisement from the SCCM console and I reboot the machine I still get the PXE Boot Aborted message… a small workaround I always use is the following.
- Clear the PXE Advertisement using SCCM console
- Stop the WDS Service on the SCCM PXE Server
- Clear RemoteInstall$\SMSTemp on the SCCM PXE Server
- Start WDS Service on the SCCM PXE Server
And voila! The advertisement does work this time around…
All in all I have experienced a lot of troubles with PXE and SCCM… I am really hoping the next version of SCCM will bring major improvements to this part….
Creating a custom boot image for SCCM SP2 (WinPE 3.0)
Today I had to recreate my x86 boot image in my SCCM environment. I had just upgraded my testserver to SCCM SP2 and found that the old way of creating a boot image didn’t work anymore… seeing as SCCM SP2 uses DISM.exe instead of imagex and peimg. So I went looking for instructions on creating a custom SCCM SP2 image, but couldn’t found any, so here are the instructions 
.
1. Start the Deployment Tools Command prompt and enter the following command:
COPYPE.CMD x86 1 c:\WINPE
When you're working on a 64-bit WinPE image use "amd64" instead of "x86"
2. Mount the winpe.wim file to the mount dir that’s created automatically:
DISM /Mount-Wim /WIMFile:c:\winpe\winpe.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:C:\winpe\mount
3. Add the packages required by SCCM to the wim (again, if you’re working on 64-bit Windows PE substitute "x86" with "amd64")
DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-scripting.cab”
DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-wmi.cab”
After this step you can continue adding packages (such as winpe-hta.cab and winpe-mdac.cab) or custom files to the boot image. The 2 packages worked out above (Scripting and WMI) are required by SCCM, without these packages you will receive an error during updating your boot image to the distribution points.
4. Commit the changes to the WIM and unmount the WIM
DISM /Unmount-Wim /Mountdir:c:\winpe\mount /commit (thank you for the correction Matt!, It appears as if I was quite sleepy when I wrote this post
)
5. Import your custom boot image into SCCM.
That’s it, just as simple as it was with the previous version of WAIK, only different commands
The fundamental flaw of “thin-clients”
Check out this great article by Jeroen van de Kamp:
In his article Jeroen points out why organizations should steer away from “thin-clients” and steer towards ‘thin-PC’s”.
Get VSI 2.0 PRO for free!
Yes its true, you can get VSI 2.0 Pro for free, Login Consultants just announced that all Bloggers/Media can get a free NFR license to play around with. Just send an email to vsi@loginconsultants.com with as much's details as possible. 
New version of the MDT Wizard Editor is available
As I was browsing a few of my standard blog sites this morning I noticed that Michael Niehaus has uploaded a new version of the MDT Wizard Editor.
Original post by Michael here
VSI 2.0 Released
Mark just gave me the heads up that he and Jeroen released VSI 2.0!!
I would like to congratulate Mark and Jeroen on this awesome achievement! You guys can be proud of yourselves!!!
The beta 3 was very well received, just a couple minor fixes were required, and we updated the documentation. In comparison to VSI 1.0 we made tremendous improvements in the overall quality and reliability of VSI.
Feel free to mention this on your website (if you think this is interesting of course). We do not have an official press release, but for your convenience we made a summary you can use:
Login Consultants releases the brand new and free VSI 2.0, a specifically designed benchmark for SBC and VDI environments. VSI loads the system with simulated user workload, and focuses on how much users can run on the system before it saturates. VSI is 100% platform and protocol independent, and VSI configuration is simplified and automated where possible. As a result, VSI is a turn-key benchmark solution: perform tests within days instead of weeks. No need to create the workloads first. VSI is intended to be used by VDI/SBC engineers/admins, a degree in testing methodologies is not required.
VSI 2.0 introduces new workloads, and an improved indexing method: VSImax. Overall, VSI 2.0 will be a much smoother experience in comparison to VSI 1.0, many best practices and lessons learned from project VRC are now included in this release. The free version is called “VSI 2.0 Express”, the advanced version is “VSI 2.0 PRO”.
The most important 2.0 features are:
- Completely new, more realistic, medium workload
- Support for IE8, Office 2010, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2
- Highly improved robustness (even under extreme loads)
- Improved response timer mechanism and index: VSImax
- Over 100 fixes and usability improvements
- Multilanguage Support (PRO only)
- Other workloads such as: light, heavy and multimedia (PRO only)
- External clock calibration and response time measurement (PRO only)
- Customization Support (PRO only)
VSI can be downloaded from Login Consultants download section: http://www.loginconsultants.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=20&Itemid=149 .”
Disk to VHD Converter (Disk2VHD)
The Sysinternals guys did it again . This time they have given us the "Poor mans P2V" solution, and they call it: Disk2VHD.
The idea behind this is pretty cool, they use the Windows Volume Snapshot capability, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to convert. It will create one VHD for every disk but it will only include the partitions you select. The really cool thing about this: You can run it ONLINE!
There are some (small) limitations the VHD size limit is 127GB (because virtual pc doesn't support bigger VHD’s), and do not attach the VHD’s on the same system you created them because you will get an collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk.
Ofcourse they put in in their Sysinternals Suite that can be downloaded from here
Add optional updates to MDT
. As you all know you can add your own applications as optional packages so you can select them pre-installation. This got me thinking: Let’s add windows update as optional package and use the framework that’s already available for this.Howto:
- Add a new application
- Standard application
- Quiet installation command
- cscript.exe "%SCRIPTROOT%\ZTIWindowsUpdate.wsf"
- Quiet installation command
That’s it
Whoo!! VMware reads our blog.
Or maybe not , it could be they already planned to release a new beta version of ThinApp in november. VMware announced this news at VMworld 2009. The final release is planned for Q1 2010 a little late if you ask me.. since there are already some working versions out there: for instance check Rubens video.
Next to that i also found a nice howto that shows how to decompile Thinapp and Xenocode packages created by NickOn and a nice little script that executes Thinreg in a decent way with support for recursive folders (here).
MDT 2010: Fix for ‘Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed”
There is now a fix for the problem that MDT 2010 has when connecting to the deployment share with different credentials in sysprep, refresh, replace and custom task-sequences.
Read more about it here
DennisDamen.com
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