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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

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 .”

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

Since Henk is the MDT guy on this blog he got me interested enough to give it a try. For testing purposes i use and break a lot of virtual machines so using MDT + WDS to recreate them wasn’t such a bad idea. Out of the box you can give your task sequence the option to run windows update post-setup: But then it will run every time .  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”

That’s it

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).

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

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 has been released for public downloading. Get your copy here.

Michael Niehaus did a great series of blog posts on most of the new features of MDT 2010. 

• MDT 2010 New Feature #1: Logging directly to the network
• MDT 2010 New Feature #2: Gathering virtualization details
• MDT 2010 New Feature #3: Suspend and resume a Lite Touch task sequence
• MDT 2010 New Feature #4: Folders everywhere
• MDT 2010 New Feature #5: Support for multiple deployment shares
• MDT 2010 New Feature #6: Drag and drop
• MDT 2010 New Feature #7: Boot image creation optimized
• MDT 2010 New Feature #8: No more visible command windows when booting Lite Touch Windows PE
• MDT 2010 New Feature #9: Copy and paste support in the Deployment Workbench task sequence editor
• MDT 2010 New Feature #10: Detection of signed drivers
• MDT 2010 New Feature #11: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support
• MDT 2010 New Feature #12: USMT 4.0 hardlink support
• MDT 2010 New Feature #13: New task sequence templates
• MDT 2010 New Feature #14: Database improvements
• MDT 2010 New Feature #15: Finish actions
• MDT 2010 New Feature #16: PowerShell support
• MDT 2010 New Feature #17: Customizable boot image process
• MDT 2010 New Feature #18: Selection Profiles
• MDT 2010 New Feature #19: Improved Driver Management

Being one of the developers of Login VSI of course i have to want to post something about it, but since we at IThastobeCool want to give you something special i decided to create a video of what Login VSI really does.

The video shows you the “Medium” user workload of Login VSI Express (read: Free) in this session we measure user experience by timing window events. You can imagine running this test with one user does not tell you the performance of the server but look what happens when you add 287!

“Login VSI 2.0 is the second iteration of Login VSI 1.0: the free and specifically designed benchmark for SBC and VDI environments. VSI 2.0 introduces completely new workloads, and a improved and more accurate index called VSImax. Overall, VSI 2.0 will be a much smoother experience, many best practices and lessons learned from project VRC are now included in this release. The free version will now be called “Login VSI 2.0 Express”, the advanced version is called “Login VSI 2.0 PRO”. The most important new  2.0 features are:

Workload(s) re-build from scratch

· New, more realistic, medium workload (now 10 instead of 18 minutes)

· Real-world end-user websites (with rich flash content)

· Windows 7 and Windows 2008 r2 support

· IE 8 support

· New Zip and PDF printer (BullZip)

· Highly improved robustness (even under extreme loads)

· Improved response timer mechanism and index: VSImax

VSI 2.0 PRO features

· Multilanguage Support (Express only support English OS and Office)

· Detailed logging

· Runtime calibration of timed events and response time measurement using an external SQL server clock (important for hypervisor comparisons)

· Office 2003 and Office 2010 support

· Customization Support (ad your own apps to the VSI workload)

Analyzer Changes

· New VSImax calculation: much more precise

· Automatic renaming of excel files to “testname.xltm”

· Remember settings from last session

AD Setup Changes

· Split system / user policy objects / added Computers OU

· Improved setup user objects (no password expiry etc)

Launcher

· New pre-launch naming of test: no more archiving of tests needed

This beta can be downloaded from Login Consultants

Looks like Microsoft is releasing a “Green IT” release for SCCM….

As posted by Jeff Wettlaufer (Sr. Technical Product Manager System Center at Microsoft)

There are a few areas of focus for ConfigMgr R3, with the main engineering effort concentrating on Power Management.  Here are the goals for this feature:

Power Management
The goal of this capability is to enable Configuration Manager to further reduce the operational costs of IT by providing basic power management features native to the product.  Our approach is based on 3 primary areas:

A. Help the organization plan a power strategy by monitoring current power state and consumptions and reporting on machine utilization trends, current power settings and current energy consumption

B. Enable the Administrator to easily create, deploy and enforce specific power settings using the existing ConfigMgr infrastructure 
   −Ability to set peak and non-peak schedules
   −Ability to remediate settings if changed
   −Ability to opt out machines from power policy

C. Provide the business meaningful report formats that are relevant to Power Management

An effective approach to power management needs to maximize power policy deployment while minimizing the impact to the end-user. System Center Configuration Manager helps customers further reduce their operational costs by adding new in box capability to their ConfigMgr infrastructure, and by seamlessly enabling power management client agent services to their existing Collection landscape.

In addition to power management, ConfigMgr R3 will provide customers with enhanced scale and performance support above current numbers.  In addition, further capabilities – in time for your Window 7 deployments – around Operating System Deployment will be enabled.

Configuration Manager 2007 R3 will release will release as a beta at the end of October 2009, with a targeted release of late Q1 calendar 2010.  Continued blogging and product news, Twitter updates, interviews with key people on the project, and some videos and demos of the new code in action will be releasing over the coming months.

As posted by Cliff Hobbs on wmug.co.uk.

It’s official, the RC of SP2 is now available for download from Connect.

IMPORTANT: Remember that that Microsoft only supports TAP Customers running this in Production. If you’re not a TAP customer then make sure you only run it in your lab.

More details:

The System Center Configuration Manager team would like to announce that the following has been released and available for download:

Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2 Release Candidate

This is the official Release Candidate build for Configuration Manager 2007 SP2.

New features:

• Refer to the SP2 Overview article posted on the primary Configuration Manager MSConnect site for all the new features and new supported configurations
• Hotfixes included in SP2 article can be found on the primary Configuration Manager MSConnect page.
• Deployment guides for BranchCache and the new AMT features are available in the download section.
• The new OpsMgr07 R2 ConfigMgr07 Management Pack can also be downloaded, this supports 64bit OpsMgr client agents.
• Please review the Release Notes before performing any installation and upgrade.

Feedback and Support:

• All registered Sp2 Open Beta users can submit bugs, design change requests (DCR’s), and other feedback. See the help link on the ConfigMgr MSConnect homepage for more instructions.
• Newsgroups are a great way to post questions and receive general support question answers.

If you experience any issues with the download or the MSConnect site please contact, sccmtap@microsoft.com

Regards,

The Configuration Manager Customer Team