Category Archives: Deployment

The long term benefits of Hyper-V (and Windows) in the Xbox One

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While many gaming enthusiasts have had a crash course in Hyper-V since the recent Microsoft announcements, for those of us on the IT side of the fence have had time to think about the possible ramifications of this on our world, and the good news is that it’s all good news.

More Hyper-V Hosts = More Data = Better Hyper-V Hosts

One of the most critical benefits I see in this is that Microsoft can drastically install the base of Hyper-V clients, and they will be used in different ways to the ones it has in market today. Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise have changed the way in which we can take Hyper-V with us without installing a server OS on our laptops. They also tend to violate the best practice scenarios of minimal workloads in the host OS.

The Windows 8 Enterprise laptop on which I’m typing this generally has two VMs running, as well as Outlook, Skype, Yammer, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, and Remote Desktop Connection instances just to get started. Add dynamic memory support to the mix, and you end up with something very different behaviour to a server running Hyper-V. Memory pressure is coming from the host’s applications rather than from other VMs.

Xbox One now provides a different type of pressure on the host – the latency/lag of the gaming VM is now an incredibly high priority. The focus on CPU cache versus the PS4 implementation of the AMD Jaguar architecture could be a direct response to this, and in the Windows world, CPU cache made incredibly large differences to certain workloads. One of first times this was seen was back in the days of the 256KB, 512KB and 1024KB L2 Cache versions of the Pentium Pro. Yes, this was almost 20 years ago, and I still remember seeing SQL Server benchmarks that showed huge gains with chips that were mostly identical apart from their cache implementation.

The net result of this is that Hyper-V will be better across a variety of workloads. As the Xbox One rolls out globally, Hyper-V will without a doubt be the most used non-server based hypervisor in the market, and continue to build confidence the Hyper-V name. There are risks with this association – one bad Xbox One update that negatively affects Hyper-V reliability can be used by VMware in compete discussions for years to come, but the fixed hardware in the Xbox One should minimise any chance of this happening.

Threads. Threads. Threads. Threads. Threads. Threads. Threads. Threads.

Due to close ties with Intel folk in a previous life, I’ve tended to be on the bleeding edge of core counts in my home machines. There was nothing more exciting than seeing the number of logical CPU’s exposed by task manager doubling every couple of years. Below is my current Hyper-V host, more than suitable for a while to come.

32

So why is the high core support important? This is the way many workloads have moved, and if you think about the move to various forms of distributed computing, anything that can be offloaded to another core within the same CPU, CPU within the same system, across the network to another system, across the internet to another group of systems etc. etc. etc. you see where things can go. Scalability is good.

Many of us who cross over into the enthusiast space get frustrated when we still see games that don’t take advantage of more than two CPU cores, so we should see the game developers learn a few tricks to really take advantage of what the Xbox One can do, and then utilise these skills on the desktop PC market. Over time the improvements in PC game development tools required to do this will benefit non-game developers. Taking a step back in time and looking at some of the multi-core improvements Microsoft made to their transcoding engine in Media Center and Windows Media Player as core counts improved show that Microsoft does take advantage of these capabilities where possible.

Next Gen Windows in a VHDX file

Some of use are already the Boot From VHD(X) features in Windows, and something many of us have seen for a while is that this has moved beyond a novelty and into something very useful for a variety of situations. Microsoft’s efforts to improve their management tools to support VHD and VHDX files is also apparent.

What we haven’t seen yet is a version of Windows that ships from Microsoft as a VHD in retail type packaging. Yes, they make trial versions of Windows client and servers available as VHD files, as well as distributing complex environments like the Customer Immersion Experience in a series of VHDs, but what does the future hold?

I don’t think we need a crystal ball to predict the possibility of a Hyper-V installation as the first stage of a future Windows installation process, and then the compressed VHD being expanded onto your SSD. Whether or not we have to wait for Boot From VHD to be the accepted way at first, meaning we have a couple of generations of Windows to wait, but it’s really not a big leap of faith.

It Expands The Installed Base Of Windows (8ish)

I admit it, I like Windows 8. Sure, some of the new UI elements aren’t very intuitive, but the 8.1 announcements should go a long way towards addressing some concerns that are out there. While I don’t expect the Windows Intune team to add Xbox One as a supported device type to the 5 devices per user that are allowed, I’m sure there will be some serious efforts to expose more of the Windows functionality out in the various communities that enjoy those challenges. While there are many potential scenarios that would be completely unsupported and in violation of lots of legalese, they haven’t been a deterrent to many in the past.

Full Of Geeky Goodness

As someone firmly entrenched in the world of Microsoft who doesn’t spend anywhere near as much time gaming as I used to, the Xbox One is still something that I’ll be buying as soon as I can use my Microsoft  Alumni benefits to order it. The question that it raises is how do I reorganise my entertainment unit to accommodate it. It’s already maxed out, so I need think creatively to get there…

 

MAP Toolkit 8.5 Beta Program

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The Microsoft Assessment And Planning Toolkit team are at it again, with a new beta program you can sign up for.

This update includes the following key features and benefits

  • Newly designed user interface makes it easier to find and use the right MAP scenario for the task at hand.
  • Usage tracking scenarios for Lync, SharePoint and Exchange have been updated to include the latest versions.
  • Advances in virtual machine discovery offer improved VM inventory results.
  • New Windows Volume Licensing scenario helps identify the licensing status of your desktop computers.

More details from the MAP team…

The latest release from the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) team provides organizations with tools to accelerate their migration to the cloud.

Download the beta materials on Connect:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

Thanks for your ongoing interest and participation in the MAP beta review program. We hope you’ll take the time to preview and provide feedback on the MAP Toolkit 8.5 Beta.

Accelerate your Windows Server 2012 migration with Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 8.5. This latest version of MAP adds new scenarios to help plan your environment with agility while lowering the cost of delivering IT. Included in MAP 8.5 are hardware and infrastructure readiness assessments to assist you in planning the deployment of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, preparing your migration to Windows Azure Virtual Machines, readying your environment for Office 2013 and Office 365, and tracking your usage of Windows Server, Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange.

Newly designed user interface

The MAP Toolkit 8.5 Beta features a newly designed user interface which provides a more intuitive user experience. Scenarios have been organized into Scenario Groups to allow quick navigation and display at-a-glance summaries on individual scenario tiles. Details for each scenario can be found in the Scenario Detail Pages along with a checklist of steps needed to maximize your results and enable one-click report generation.

Lync 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Exchange 2013 Usage Tracking Support

Groundbreaking new releases of Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange have been brought to market this year. These products provide IT organizations and their end users greater efficiency, productivity and flexibility than ever before. With the release of the MAP Toolkit 8.5 Beta, the usage tracking scenarios within MAP have been updated to leverage new usage tracking capabilities provided within Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange resulting in less  administrative effort and greater accuracy to collect and report on end user access to these servers.

Enhanced Virtual Machine discovery

Server virtualization has become the standard method for optimizing an organization’s resource utilization, availability, and agility. The MAP Toolkit 8.5 Beta assists in the effort to virtualize with added discoverability of virtual machines for software asset location and reporting to facilitate license compliance for highly virtualized environments. Additionally, the MAP Toolkit now includes enhanced inventory reports which detail the virtual machines discovered, as well as the total number of virtual machines running on each host.

Windows Volume Licensing scenario helps to Identify license status of computers running Windows Vista SP1 and newer

Microsoft Volume Licensing gives you flexible, cost-effective access to the Microsoft products and services that your business is built upon. The MAP Toolkit 8.5 Beta provides the ability to detect and report on the volume license status of client computers in your enterprise so you can rest assured that you are in full compliance with your volume license agreement.

Tell us what you think!

We value your input. Download the beta on Connect and tell us what you think! Send your comments to the MAP team:  mapfdbk@microsoft.com

Availability

This program is now open. The beta review period will run through June 28, 2013.

Tell your friends

To join the beta review program for Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 8.5 Beta, visit Microsoft Connect at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=217916.

Learn more

Visit the MAP home page:  www.microsoft.com/map

Get the latest news straight from the MAP team:  http://blogs.technet.com/mapblog

Troubleshooting Windows 8 Hyper-V Networking

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Today I experienced a weird issue after installing the Hyper-V role on a Windows 8 client, during which the network adapter model changed, a phantom NIC appeared,in the Hyper-V UI and my VM failed to connect to the network. There were also issues when trying to create a new Virtual Switch, but thankfully it was something that a quick search on the Intel site turned up a few suggestions.

The system has an Intel DH67CL desktop board installed, and the physical NIC is the Intel 82579V (aka V), but after Hyper-V was installed and configured it started reporting itself as the 82579LM (aka LM), which then meant that the Virtual Switch in Hyper-V wasn’t letting the client connect to the network. The first sign of this was that the VM wasn’t able to pick up an IP address via DHCP, and attempting to disable and enable the NIC did not improve the situation.

Going back into Hyper-V Manager, the Virtual Switch settings gave me a choice of using either the the V or LM NIC, but device manager only showed that I had LM. Uninstalling the hardware through device manager and rescanning made the NIC reappear as the V variant. Hmmm, maybe things weren’t going to be as simple to resolve as I expected. Unfortunately I didn’t get a screenshot until after I had resolved the issue, but here’s how it should look.

Virtual Switch

Thankfully the Intel site revealed what I was after in the second search screen, which was a utility for resolving this exact issue where the non-volatile memory on the NIC was reporting the wrong hardware, apparently something that is more frequent under Windows 8. This machine has been running Windows 8 for an extended time period without issue, so it really seems enabling Hyper-V was the trigger for this.

Intel Search Results

I grabbed the download from the Intel site, the utility description was as follows…

This utility resolves an issue where during system resume, the Intel® 82579V Gigabit Ethernet PHY Network Connection erroneously reports the device id as an Intel® 82579LM Gigabit Ethernet Controller Network Connection, resulting in a Windows* Code 10 error and loss of network connection.
Not all systems with the Intel 82579V Network connection will see this problem. Systems using Microsoft Windows* 8 are more susceptible to the issue.
If you experience this error, Intel recommends that you update the non-volatile memory for your network connection by downloading and running the NVM Update Utility.
Three versions of the utility are available to support three different operation systems (Windows 32 bit; Windows 64 bit; DOS).

Steps to run the update tool:
1. Download the utility.
3. Open a command prompt window with administrator privileges
2. Select the utility in the directory or folder based on the operating system installed
a. 32-bit Windows use the utility in the Win32 directory
b. 64-bit Windows use the utility in the Win64e directory
c. DOS use the utility in the DOS directory
4. Run the executable file from the common prompt
5. The NVM image will be updated. Reboot the computer for best results.

Compressed Folders

Obviously I needed the 64 bit version, how else would I be running Hyper-V! Assuming I needed to run this as an admin, it was time for Windows Key + X to let me launch an elevated command prompt with ease.

image

Running the command in verbose mode indicated that a machine restart was required, and voila – after a reboot everything worked as planned.

Admin

Of course, I wasn’t satisfied, I went back to the Intel site for their update utility after discovering my network drivers were a year old, so why not update them. And the graphics driver. And the audio driver. Now the scary piece of all of this… it’s my long running Media Center machine. If you aren’t familiar with the site, take a look here. For those of you who are Media Center users you know that I’ve broken several of the golden rules in regards to deploying extra roles and updating drivers with disregard to system stability, but that’s what System Restore and backups are for.

Intel Update Center

In case you were wondering, the VM that I moved over to this machine is for Threat Management Gateway, which I primarily run as a caching solution. There is a bit of hardware juggling going on at home at the moment, which necessitated this move, but I’ll drill into this in a future post.

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.0 Released

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Over the past few years, one of the tools that I’ve been recommending highly is MAP, and now MAP 8.0 has been released and is ready for mass consumption. While I would normally shy away from recommending beta versions of software in a production environment, MAP is one of those tools that I think I think is an exception.

There are a few reasons for this, firstly it means you have the chance to provide feedback on something that will help shape future deployments for yourself and others. Secondly, as you are using it for information gathering purposes, it’s not going to be as potentially disruptive as a service pack or operating system beta, for example. Third, but far from the final reason, is that it allows you to plan further out even if you aren’t going to be deploying the technologies it is targeting any time soon.

What do I mean by that third point? Let’s take a look at the main new features and benefits of MAP 8.0, and explore how MAP benefits some of them.

Windows Server 2012 readiness
Windows 8 readiness
Office 2013 readiness
Office 365 readiness
Windows Azure Virtual Machine migration
Track Lync Enterprise/Plus users

A recent project I was involved with was the migration of a multitude of Windows Servers on aging hardware platforms, previous versions of Hyper-V and VMWare. This organisation didn’t have a great inventory of their existing environment, which is now being addressed, but MAP exposed enough information to allow the planning of the high availability Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V cluster, including insight into the memory requirements for the servers. It’s a great experience when you can see that maxing out the memory on the Hyper-V servers isn’t just something that is desirable, but also highly affordable and has a strong business case to support it.

While Windows 8 isn’t on the radar of many customers at this point, it will inevitably work its way into many organisations due to some of the new laptops, tablets and convertible devices that are entering the market. I’ve already encountered one IT department that asked if they could load Windows 7 onto their brand new Lenovo Twist purchases, to which the answer should be a resounding “no”! With Windows 7 deployments still being fresh in the minds of many IT departments, MAP will highlight that from a software and hardware perspective there won’t be too many surprises.

With the upcoming branding of Office 2013 and Office 365 seeming to become interchangeable in some scenarios, potentially leading to some confusion in the marketplace, MAP will help paint a clearer picture of potential issues that may be seen during client and server migrations to new on premise and hosted versions. The move to Office 2013 on the desktop from Office 2010 should be fairly painless for users from an interface perspective, in fact most of the concerns I’ve had about the new version is about the colour scheme and contrast as opposed to differences in the layout or functionality. The ribbon UI has matured from what we first saw in Office 2007, and I just don’t hear requests to bring back the old menu system like was heard in the Office 2007 timeframe. I wonder if this can be extrapolated to mean that people will stop asking for a Start menu by the Windows 10 timeframe? One can only hope!

The more forward thinking elements here is the Azure VM migration component of MAP. Working for an organisation that is primarily focused on Microsoft online services, the changes taking place within Azure are things we openly embrace. We are finding more and more scenarios where a hosted server of some description is required, as hybrid scenarios can often provide scenarios that provide the best of the online world while retaining some on-premise capabilities that can’t be duplicated without some type of infrastructure.

That’s a bit more than I was planning on writing for what was supposed to be a news announcement, but it’s worth getting the message out wide on MAP because I find that too many Microsoft partners and customers don’t know about the product, or do know about it, but have never gotten around to using it.

So, don’t delay, grab it now!

Download MAP 8.0

Altech Windows Server 2012 Launch Site – Week 6 Content

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My posts from the Altech launch site from last week…

Deploying Your OEM Windows Images With Windows Server 2012

With the introduction of Windows Server 2012, there comes a new version of Windows Deployment Services, and some new storage capabilities that make it worth investigating when it comes to deploying in your build environment. In today’s post I will  cover some of the things you can do with Windows Server 2012 to make the most of its capabilities.

SSD Benefits For Windows Server 2012 Part 2

In the last article I discussed some of the scenarios in which SSDs benefit Windows Server 2012 workloads. Today I’ll spend a bit more time focused on the benefits with virtualisation workloads, and how they can allow greater hardware scale with lower resources.

Altech Windows 8 Launch Site – Week 6 Content

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My posts from the Altech launch site from last week…

Rethinking Your Windows 8 Pre-Install Part 1

With the general availability of Windows 8 rapidly approaching, it’s time to start thinking about how your system builds will change when the new OS ships. Today I’ll cover off some of the things that system builders will need to take into account from the software perspective.

Rethinking Your Windows 8 Pre-Install Part 1

With the general availability of Windows 8 rapidly approaching, it’s time to start thinking about how your system builds will change when the new OS ships. Today I’ll cover off some of the things that system builders will need to take into account from the software perspective.

Organising The Windows 8 Start Screen Part 1

With Windows 8, the demise of the Start menu means that your approach to organising your applications may change. I have previously discussed pinning applications to the task bar as a way of staying in the classic desktop view, and there’s always the cluttered desktop approach. But when it comes to a unified way of finding and launching your current applications and new Windows 8 apps, it pays to spend some time organising the new Start screen.

Organising The Windows 8 Start Screen Part 2

In yesterday’s post I covered how to start taking control of the Windows 8 Start screen, and in today’s post I’ll continue on, discussing several strategies to improve your experience with it.

Making Smarter Hardware Choices For Windows 8 Pro

In previous posts I’ve discussed some of the new hardware advances that Windows 8 supports. In today’s post I will focus on how to select hardware components that can help to ensure you get the best experiences from the Windows 8 PCs that you supply to your customers based on features that will be used. Some smarter planning early on will ensure that you and your customers aren’t caught by surprise later on.

Altech Windows 8 Launch Site–Week 5 Content

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Here are last week’s articles, ramping up with launch rapidly approaching!

Gaming Improvements With Windows 8

With Windows 8, gaming is now a much more varied beast than it was under earlier versions of Windows. The rise of casual gaming over the past years was something that Windows 7 didn’t directly address, instead it continued the ongoing focus on DirectX.

Improving The Hyper-V User Experience

In the first two parts of this series, I covered the steps involved in moving virtual machines from Virtual PC to Hyper-V, so that existing applications, settings and data were maintained. Today’s post will cover what you can do to help improve the user experience so that they don’t have to become familiar with the Hyper-V tools in order keep using the VMs.

Importing your Virtual Machines into Windows 8 Pro Hyper-V

In yesterday’s post I covered the necessary steps to export virtual machines from Virtual PC in Windows 7 to aid migration across to Hyper-V in Windows 8 Pro, and today I will cover what is necessary to get them running under Hyper-V. This is also a handy guide for those of you who may not be importing VMs, but still need some guidance on VM setup in Hyper-V.

Exporting Your Windows 7 Virtual PC Virtual Machines

With the move from Virtual PC in Windows XP to Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform in Windows 8 Pro, you may have customers that you will need to do some migration of the virtual machines to the new platform. By following the steps in this article you can speed up the time to move the virtual machine (VM) to the new platform, as well as avoid a few common pitfalls that may be encountered.

Exporting Your Windows 7 Virtual PC Virtual Machines

With the move from Virtual PC in Windows XP to Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform in Windows 8 Pro, you may have customers that you will need to do some migration of the virtual machines to the new platform. By following the steps in this article you can speed up the time to move the virtual machine (VM) to the new platform, as well as avoid a few common pitfalls that may be encountered.

Bandwidth Savings With The Peer Distribution Service

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One of the many new features introduced with the Windows Intune June 2012 release was the enablement of Peer Distribution of BITS content. While this is something that is usually thought of as being enabled by the combination of Active Directory, Group Policy and BrancheCache, Windows Intune is delivering this capability without any real infrastructure requirements, apart from having multiple client PCs with the same OS and app requirements on the same subnet.

Enabling Peer Distribution

You need to make sure that the appropriate firewall options are set via the Windows Intune console before you begin. In the following image, you will see the final option, BITS Peercaching, which is the important option to enable for the appropriate network types. In this case, I’ve allowed it on Public networks, only because the test virtual network environment is completely isolated from other traffic, in a real world scenario you wouldn’t enable this option.

Firewall Policy

Now that it’s set, make sure you apply the policy as needed, and refresh the policies on the required machines to make sure they get the setting sooner rather than later.

How To Tell If Peer Distribution Is Working

There are several ways, with the first including watching your internet traffic usage as new clients come online and download updates. If there are other active devices on the network, this could be hard to judge. In my isolated TMG Windows Intune test network I can monitor incoming and outgoing traffic on the appropriate NICs quite easily, and generally speaking, if I see lots of traffic, I know it’s not working. If I see hardly any traffic, yet the clients are pulling down several hundred megabytes of updates, I know that things are working well.

Secondly you can monitor how quickly the updates are being delivered to the client when you manually check. If the incoming traffic is faster than your connection allows, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s working. This isn’t the easiest one in the world to judge if you have a fast connection and the results could be interpreted either way.

That leaves the third option, which give a much more definitive answer, and without resorting to any command line utilities or advanced network tools. All you need is the Network Tab within Resource Monitor from within Windows 7, and you’re set.

Peerdist Resource Monitor

Looking carefully at this image, you can see that PeerDist is retrieving the content from the other machines on the network. By pulling from multiple machines at once, your client will receive the updates as quickly as possible, and without placing a huge load on each of the other PCs. All up this machine needed over 350MB of updates, which were easily delivered by other PCs on the network. Faster downloads and installations, and leaving your internet connection less utilised is an all around winner in anyone’s books.

In case you’re wondering, the 350MB of updates are all of the post Windows 7 SP1 updates, along with all of the .Net Framework updates, and other recommended updates – not just security or critical updates.

Getting The Most Out Of Peer Distribution

What makes for a good Peer Distribution environment? Firstly, the other machine or machines on the network with the content that you want need to be powered on. If you are in an environment where people tend to have all of their PCs turned on at the same time as your PC, you should see a benefit. Next, you need other PCs to be running the same OS as yours to benefit from PeerDist with Windows Updates that you approve through Windows Intune.

A network with one Windows XP 32 bit PC, one Windows XP 64 bit PC, one Windows Vista 32 bit PC, one Windows Vista 64 bit PC, one Windows 7 32 bit PC and one Windows 7 64 bit PC is not going to save you a huge amount of bandwidth on Patch Tuesday. All is not lost though, as you will find that some updates, such as .Net Framework and others, apply across multiple versions of operating systems, so there will still be some net benefit.

This scenario highlights that having a Standard Operating Environment, or at least minimising the number of client operating systems installed, is going to make this process more effective. In a Windows 7 environment, you only need Windows 7 Pro or higher installed for this feature to be enabled, so you don’t even have to roll out your Windows 7 Enterprise (or soon Windows 8 Enterprise!) upgrades in order to deliver this service.

You will always need to bring down each update at least once (twice or more if the machines hosting that update are unavailable when other machines require them), but the potential for bandwidth savings here are huge. As we move to a world where we are consuming more and more cloud service, any bandwidth savings we can make are a step in the right direction!

Now that you’ve got an understanding of the benefits, next up will be a review of two methods of distributing the Office 2013 beta, and whether PeerDist delivers…

Microsoft Assessment And Planning Toolkit 7.0 Available For Download

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As a huge fan of MAP, I’m happy to report that the latest version is now available for download. After having used the 7.0 beta alongside the previous version during the last major network migration project I was involved with, I’m glad I can switch wholly across to the new version.

New capabilities allow you to:

  • Understand your readiness to deploy Windows Server 2012      in your environment
  • Determine Windows 8 readiness
  • Investigate how Windows Server and System Center can      manage your heterogeneous environment through VMware migration and Linux      server virtualization assessments
  • Size your desktop virtualization needs for both Virtual      Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote      Desktop Services
  • Ready your information platform for the cloud with the      SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration assessment
  • Evaluate your licensing needs with usage tracking for      Lync 2010, active users and devices, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server      2012

Learn more

Visit the MAP home page: www.microsoft.com/map

Get the latest news straight from the MAP team: http://blogs.technet.com/mapblog

MAP works with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Security Compliance Manager to help you plan, securely deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies—easier, faster, and at less cost. Learn more atwww.microsoft.com/solutionaccelerators.

 

MDT 2012 Update 1 Beta 1 Available For Download

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At TechEd last month, one of the sessions I really enjoyed was the MDT 2012 and Windows 8 sesion, which covered off some of the improvements that were coming to help with Windows 8 deployments. Unfortunately the video and presentation for that session have been removed from the site, along with many of the other Windows 8 based sessions.

MDT 2012 Update 1 will officially support Windows 8 advanced scenarios, and includes a new version of Windows PE that does a good job of speeding up installating times, not just for Windows 8, but can also be applied to Windows 7 installs as well.

As it currently stands, there isn’t any ARM support, but considering that it seems to be targetting OEMs only for now, that’s not a big surprise. Other features that would be coming later that were discussed included install and boot from USB3, Windows To GO, as well as the deprecation of several features including Imagex and diskpart.

Anyway, here’s the official Microsoft blurb on the new beta…

Download MDT 2012 Update 1 Beta 1 now!

 

Download the latest release to stay up-to-date on your deployment needs. New features and enhancements make large-scale desktop and server deployments smoother than ever!

This release expands your deployment capabilities with support for the latest software releases, including Windows 8 Release Preview, Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate, and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 Community Technology Preview.

 

Notable new features include:

·       Support for using the DaRT 8 Beta with the Windows 8 Release Preview version of the Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK).

·       New “Build Your Own Pages” support for User-Driven Installation (UDI), enabling IT pros to create new wizard panes using simple drag-and-drop operations – no coding required.

·       Integration with System Center Orchestrator, enabling task sequences to invoke Orchestrator runbooks at any point in the deployment process.

·       Completely reworked “Roles and Features” logic, supporting both installation and removal, as well as providing a new Lite Touch wizard pane for selecting roles and features to install at deploy time.

·       Support for PowerShell 3.0 to make it easier to run PowerShell scripts inside task sequences on Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and Windows PE 4.0.

·       Simple monitoring functionality for Configuration Manager task sequences, leveraging the monitoring capabilities provided initially in MDT 2012 for Lite Touch deployments.

·       Improved “boot from VHD” deployment capabilities, supporting both bare metal and refresh deployments.