Ask the Core Team

Surface Pro Firmware and Driver Pack for Enterprise deployments

John Marlin [MSFT] — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:38:00 GMT

Today I am going to discuss the Surface Pro Firmware and Driver Pack. The Surface Pro Firmware and Driver Pack is a collection of drivers and firmware updates that Enterprise will need if they want to deploy their own custom image to the Surface Pro using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, System Center Configuration Manager, or any other deployment solution.

The Surface Pro Firmware and Driver Pack can be downloaded using the following link:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=301483

This link will always direct you to the latest version of this driver package since we will be releasing this on a regular basis.

The current package which was released 5/14/2013 contains the following:

May2013SurfacePro.zip
Surface Pro - Enterprise Deployment Quick Start Guide.pdf

The .pdf contains some general guidance around deploying to the Surface Pro using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and SCCM. It also explains how firmware updates work.

Hope this helps with your deployments!

Scott McArthur
Senior Support Escalation Engineer

How to manage Out-of-Box Drivers with the use of Model Specific Driver Groups in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update 1

Windows Server Core Team — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:44:42 GMT

Hello. My name is Bill Spears and I am a Premier Field Engineer in the Windows/Platforms group at Microsoft. In today’s blog I will discuss the approach that I use to manage Out-Of-Box drivers within the deployment process of MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update 1).

If you are used to deployments of legacy Operating Systems (such as Windows XP), Out-of-Box driver management sometimes became a very confusing task, and many folks ended up having very long driver paths in their answer files (OEMPnPDriversPath) and ended up having a large folder structure of drivers on each machine that contained drivers for any and all hardware that was to be deployed in that environment and in turn, this was a nightmare to manage. The good news is that managing your Out-of-Box drivers is now much easier and cleaner when deploying Windows 7 via Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update 1. Now you can import all of the Out-of-Box drivers that will be needed into your MDT Deployment Workbench, and then those drivers can be injected offline into your install WIM depending on which hardware you are deploying the image to.

Driver injection works as follows: When a machine is booted via the Litetouch media, PNPEnum.exe collects a hardware inventory of the devices in that machine to determine which drivers will need to be injected in to the image before the image is installed on the target machine. By default the inject driver step in the task sequence will query for driver matches in the “All Drivers” Selection Profile. So by default, you could get away with dumping all of your drivers in to the Out-Of-Box Drivers node of MDT and have most deployment scenarios install with the correct driver. In reality, this is a horrible way to approach driver management. The reason I say that is because sometimes you will have multiple drivers that state via their INF file that they will work for a particular device (PNPID), when in reality, that’s not always true. This could be the result of a poorly written driver, or it could be that even though you have a driver that is a match based on the INF, you may need to force the use of a different version of that driver for a particular model of hardware. For Best Practice, it makes more sense to create a folder structure under the Out-of-Box Driver store to better manage how you add drivers to your MDT Workbench. I prefer to create a subfolder for Each Operating System, then each architecture type (x86,x64), then each hardware model, as shown in the screen shot below:

In the screenshot above, notice the folder structure created under the Out-of-Box Drivers Node. Import the drivers for each specific model into the respective folder.

This also makes it easier when it comes time to add updated drivers for existing hardware types, or add a new folder for a new hardware type when you start getting newer model machines. Having this well organized folder structure now also lets you be very granular of what drivers you make available during your deployment by making use of MDT Variables and Rules. Consider the scenario of where PNPEnum.exe detects a piece of hardware with a certain PNPID, but where we have multiple drivers in our Out-of-Box drivers node that claim to be a match for this hardware based on the driver’s INF file information. Without the use of Selection Profiles or DriverGroups, you would not be able to force which driver gets installed. The driver who wins the built in driver ranking process would end up getting installed. By using DriverGroups, you can force the Driver Injection step of the task sequence to only look in a specific folder for its choice of drivers. Therefore you are in control of what specific drivers are available to what specific machines. This is possible by adding Model specific settings to your customsettings.ini file that point to the specific folder containing only drivers for that model based on the %model% variable that we detect during the Gather phase of Litetouch.

Now that we have our drivers imported into our folder structure in the Out-of-Box Drivers node in a manageable folder structure, it’s time to configure the customsettings.ini to add the custom Model sections. This is outlined in the screenshots below:

First, to find the model name of your machine, you could use one of the following methods.

In the screenshot above, notice I’m running the command: wmic computersystem get model to obtain the model name. Alternatively, you could obtain this info via MSinfo32 as shown below:

The screenshot above is a portion of the output from the MSInfo32 command. Notice the System Model name. Next we will configure the customsettings.ini.

Next, add the following to your customsettings.ini (Rule tab of Deployment Share properties)

[Settings]
Priority=Model,Default

[Default]

[HP Notebook 123]
DriverGroup001=Windows 7\x64\%model%
DriverSelectionProfile=nothing

[HP Desktop 234]
DriverGroup002=Windows 7\x64\%model%
DriverSelectionProfile=nothing

[Dell Laptop 345]
DriverGroup003=Windows 7\x64\%model%
DriverSelectionProfile=nothing

[Lenovo Laptop 456]
DriverGroup004=Windows 7\x64\%model%
DriverSelectionProfile=nothing

Notice we are using the Model variable to go to that specific section of the rule file, which then sets the path to only look in the subfolder that you force it to look in. Now you can rest assured that when you run this task sequence on a particular model machine, you know exactly where it will be looking to find the drivers based on what hardware is detected in that machine.

If new drivers become available from the OEM for a particular model, you would simply need to replace the new drivers in the proper folder of your Out-of-Box Drivers node. If you will be deploying this task sequence to a new piece of hardware, you would simply create a new folder in your Out-of-Box Drivers node, then import the new drivers into this folder, then create the necessary subsection for that model in your customsettings.ini (as shown above) and then you will be ready to deploy to the new hardware.

One thing to note about Driver injections is that the driver must have an INF and SYS file in order for us to install the driver this way. If a driver installs via an EXE and there is no way to extract that driver to reveal the actual INF and SYS file, then you would be forced to add that driver EXE package as an application and install it as an application. Note that in that situation, you would need to handle the Network Adapter Drivers and Mass Storage Device drivers differently to ensure that the Operating System could communicate with the storage device and the network adapter in order to complete the install, and then the Vendor’s EXE program could be launched as an application to install the other drivers.

Note that there are multiple approaches to handle Out-of-Box Driver Management with your deployments, and this is just one approach and it is the approach that works best for me. Which method you use will be dependent on what works best for you in your particular situation, as there is not always a one size fits all solution to the design process of building and managing your images. The key benefit I find from using this method is that you know exactly where your drivers are coming from and once you have the framework setup, it’s easy to add updated drivers for existing models, and easy to add new models to your deployments, and most of all, it is very organized.

Another thing to note is that when using this procedure to deploy Lenovo machines, other special considerations may need to be made. This is due to the fact the Lenovo reports back a model string that frequently changes. This is explained further in the following blog which also has a recommended solution for dealing with this scenario:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2009/07/17/querying-the-mdt-database-using-a-custom-model.aspx

I hope that this information is helpful for your design strategy of how to manage Out-of-Box drivers.

Bill Spears
Microsoft Corporation
Premier Field Engineer

Tracing with Storport in Windows 2012 and Windows 8 with KB2819476 hotfix

John Marlin [MSFT] — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:31:00 GMT

Welcome back to the CORE Team Blog. Paul Reynolds here. I would like to let everyone know about changes on how to capture Storport traces in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

NOTE: The information below is based on having hotfix KB2819476 installed (part of the April 2013 cumulative update for Windows 8 and Windows 2012). If you do not have this hotfix installed, see the previously written blog:

Tracing with Storport in Windows 2012 and Windows 8 without KB2819476 hotfix
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/01/12/tracing-with-storport-in-windows-2012-and-windows-8.aspx

We DO recommend installing the hotfix as it enhances the ability to take Storport traces in Windows 8 and Windows 2012.

Previously, Bob Golding wrote a blog on how to do Storport Tracing in Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2. If you have Windows 2008 or 2008 R2 continue to use that blog for your Storport traces.

TRACE GATHERING STEPS

The process to capture a Storport trace is similar (though not identical) to the way we do it with Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 (see Bob Golding’s blog for more detail). For those already familiar with the process, the main change is:

· Instead of choosing IOPERNOTIFICATION, a new choice called IO_PERMORMANCE is picked

For those not familiar with the process, here is an overview of how to start a Storport trace. (Most of the information is from Bob’s original blog)

1. Hit the Windows button and type Perfmon.exe, then press enter to start performance monitor.

2. Expand “Data Collector Sets” and “Event Trace Sessions”

3. Right-Click on “Event Trace Sessions”

4. Select “New, Data Collector Set”

5. The following dialogue will appear:

Give the new data collector set a name in the dialogue box. In this example I called it “Storport”.

6. Choose the “Create manually (Advanced) option and then click Next to see the following dialogue:

7. Click Add on the dialogue box above and the following list of providers will appear.

8. Select “Microsoft-Windows-Storport” and click OK. You should now see the following screen:

9. Select “Keywords (Any)” then click Edit.

10. Check the box for IO_Performance, and then click OK:

11. You should see the following screen:

12. At this point you can choose a filter to use for the Storport trace. This is useful for a long-running trace where you want to capture Storport data above a certain threshold.

Select Filter, then Edit:

This is where we enter our threshold. Anything equal to or greater than this value will be logged in the trace. If you leave the filter disabled it will create more data but will cause averages for request duration values in the Storport trace to be more in agreement to values obtained for physical disk sec/transfer from a Performance Monitor trace.

Select “Filter Enabled”, choose “Binary”, and in the “Filter Data” field enter the threshold in 100ths of nanoseconds (number of milliseconds X 10,000). This must be entered in little endian format. Refer to the table below for sample values:

Decimal	Hexadecimal	Binary (little endian)
1ms (10,000)	2710	10 27 00 00 00 00 00 00
5ms (50,000)	C350	50 C3 00 00 00 00 00 00
10ms (100,000)	186A0	A0 86 01 00 00 00 00 00
15ms (150,000)	249F0	F0 49 02 00 00 00 00 00

Note: the “Filter type” value will always remain 0 as in the example above.

Warning: the whole data line needs to be filled in when entering a threshold. For demonstration purposes, here is how to do it the WRONG WAY:

Filter values have to be reset after each successful run of a Storport trace. It DOES NOT remember the previous values used.

13. Click next and choose a root directory for the trace. In this example I use C:\perflogs:

14. Click finish. You should see a new Event Trace Session that is stopped. In this example it is called Storport.

15. Right-click the new Event Trace Session and click Start to start it:

16. You should now see your new Event Trace Session started:

17. After you are done collecting data, right-click the running Storport trace and select “Stop”.

DECIPHERING TRACE DATA

Now that we have a Storport trace, let’s look at the data it contains. A simple way to see the data is via Event Viewer:

1. Hit the Windows key, type “eventvwr.exe” and hit the enter key. The Event Viewer utility will start:

2. Right-Click on Event Viewer (local) and click on “Open Saved Log”:

3. Choose the directory the Storport trace was saved to, highlight the ETL files and click Open. In this example, we chose c:\perflogs.

4. After clicking “Open” a dialogue box will appear asking to create a new event log copy. Click “Yes”.

5. You will see the following screen. We left the settings as the default and clicked “OK”.

6. After clicking OK you will see Event ID 201 messages:

7. Let’s look at the detail of the data:

Request Duration: how long the (firmware/drivers/hardware/storage network/SAN) took to process a I/O request packet in 100ns. To convert to milliseconds, divide this number by 10,000.

Command: decimal form of SCSI command. If you wish to look up the SCSI command (convert decimal value to hex first) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_command.

SrbStatus: Status Request Block status returned from the adapter (see srb.h and scsi.h in the Microsoft WDK)

Port: This is the adapter port number (e.g. RaidPort1, etc.)

Bus: This is the Bus number

Target: Target ID of the LUN exposed to the Operating System

LUN: Logical Unit Number of the physical storage

ScsiStatus: decimal form of SCSI Status Code. If you wish to look up the SCSI Status Code (convert decimal value to hex first) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_Status_Code

DataTransferLength: the length of the data transfer in Bytes

BuildIODuration – length of time the miniport has spent in the build I/O function (usually very small, measured in 100ths of nanoseconds )

StartIODuration – length of time the miniport has spent in the start I/O function (usually very small, measured in 100ths of nanoseconds)

CLOSING THOUGHTS

When troubleshooting disk performance issues, Storport traces capture data from the last layer of software in Windows that an I/O Request Packet (IRP) will pass through before being handed off to hardware. It is an excellent tool for checking if slow disk performance is hardware related.

In a next blog post I will show a way to look at Storport data via Excel Spreadsheets with Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts. You can look at millions of rows of data if you use the free PowerPivot add-on available with Office 2013.

Paul Reynolds
Support Escalation Engineer
Windows Core Support Team

Two new Hyper-V Books available from Microsoft Press

John Marlin [MSFT] — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:27:00 GMT

Microsoft Press is releasing two new titles for IT pros who work with the Hyper-V virtualization platform:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145383068.do

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145382924.do

These scenario-focused titles provide concise technical guidance and insights for troubleshooting and optimizing networking and storage with Hyper-V. Written by experienced virtualization professionals, these little books pack a lot of value into a few pages, offering a lean read with lots of real-world insights and best practices for Hyper-V optimization in Windows Server 2012.

These guides extend your knowledge and capabilities with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 and shares hands-on insights from a team of Microsoft virtualization experts. They also provide pragmatic troubleshooting and optimization guidance from the field.

The author team includes Mitch Tulloch, series editor, and over a dozen individuals at Microsoft including Support Escalation Engineers, Premier Field Engineers, Program Managers, Data Center Specialists, and experts from Microsoft Consulting Services. These short titles will be available in June in both ebook and print format and while their primary focus is on the Windows Server 2012 version of Hyper-V, much of what they cover can also be applied to previous versions of Hyper-V. Note that these titles are not intended as systematic guides and instead cover various scenarios on how to optimize Hyper-V environments and how to troubleshoot different kinds of issues involving networking and storage for Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines.

Sessions from MMS 2013 Now Available

John Marlin [MSFT] — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:53:00 GMT

Greetings AskCore fans. I thought I would start creating a blog for a subset of the videos/sessions available at each of the conferences that Microsoft has throughout the year. These sessions will be available and will deal with topics that are discussed here on the AskCore Blog. There are numerous other sessions if you want to get into System Center products, Azure, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. They are just to numerous to list here.

All sessions at our conferences are approximately 1:15 long and are presented by either Program Managers, Product Managers, Technical Evangelists, Support Escalation Engineers, etc. Sit back and enjoy the sessions at your leisure. Most all sessions can be viewed in either MP4 and WMV. You can also download the sessions and PowerPoint presentations from the deliveries to be viewed at a later time or on some other device.

If you have attended any of these conferences, our many thanks are given. If you haven't, you should look into going to one as it is a good way of networking with others and have a good time while getting up to speed on all the new technologies.

So, without further adieu, first up: MMS 2013.

=====================

The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) brings together the brightest IT professionals from around the world to increase their technical expertise through an intensive week of training led by experts in desktop, device management, datacenter, and cloud technologies. This is held in Las Vegas every year and is a good time held by all.

MMS 101: Conquering the Summit
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/MMS101
If this is your first time attending the Microsoft Management Summit, then you don't want to miss this session! You'll learn priceless tips and tricks to maximize your investment in MMS2013. We'll give you the inside scoop on all the sessions, labs and Expo vendors. If that's not enough, we'll get you networked with other attendees and alumni from your area. Finally, we'll answer all your questions so that you have everything you need to conquer the Summit!

Windows Server 2012 in 60 Minutes
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B326

Introduction to Failover Clustering with Windows Server 2012
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B317

What's New in Windows Server 2012 Hyper–V
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B330

Availability Strategies for a Resilient Private Cloud
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B302

A Geek's Guide to USMT 5.0
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B301

Demonstrations of Assessment and Deployment Kit Tools
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B302

Advanced Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update 1 Customizations
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B303

Implementing the Windows To Go Concept in an Enterprise Environment
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B304

Deploying Windows 8 Using Lite Touch
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B308

Choosing the Right OS Deployment Tool
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B309

Windows Sysinternals Primer
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B311

What's New with Windows 8 Bitlocker and Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Management 2.0
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B312

Real World Windows 8 Deployment with MDT 2012 Update 1
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B316

Deploying Windows To Go in the Real World
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B317

What's New in Windows 8 Deployment
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B318

Making PC Recovery Easier with the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/DC-B321

Competitive Advantages of Hyper-V over VMware vSphere
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B201

File Storage Strategies for Private Cloud
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B309

How to Design and Configure Networking in VMM and HyperV (Part 1 of 2)
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B312

How to Design and Configure Networking in VMM and HyperV (Part 2 of 2)
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B313

Switching to Hyper–V: Migrating from VMware
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B325

Sit back, relax, grab some popcorn, and enjoy the sessions.

John Marlin
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Enterprise Platforms Support

Unattended Setup of Windows 8 to Surface Pro

Windows Server Core Team — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:42:06 GMT

In today’s blog I am going to explain how you can do an unattended setup of the default Windows 8 Enterprise X64 install.wim to a Surface Pro from a USB drive. Unattended setups are not new but when you are deploying to the Surface Pro (or any other UEFI system) there are some special considerations around disk partitioning and booting from USB.

Step #1: Prepare USB drive

Locate a 4GB or larger USB flash drive

Open Diskpart and run the following command

List disk
Identify the disk # of the flash drive
Sel disk X where X is the USB drive(make sure to choose correct one)
Clean
Create part primary
Assign
Active
Format FS=FAT32 quick. Note: It must be FAT32
Exit

Copy the entire contents of your Windows 8 Enterprise X64 DVD to the USB drive

Note: It is also possible to replace the default install.wim in the sources folder with your own custom install.wim. The image must be prepared using Sysprep with the /generalize and /oobe command line switches. If the install.wim is >4GB you will have either split the .wim or prepare the USB drive with multiple partitions. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/03/20/creating-bootable-usb-drive-for-uefi-computers.aspx for more information

Step #2: Create autounattend.xml

Using Windows System Image Manger create an autounattend.xml and then copy it to the root of the USB flash drive.

Since the Surface Pro is a UEFI system you must create different disk partitioning then a legacy BIOS based computer. I have attached a sample autounattend.xml to the blog that is fully automated and will end with you logged in to the computer as local administrator account. My disk partitioning follows the default configuration. Below shows the different partitions and sizes

Figure 1. Default UEFI disk configuration

If you want to setup for recovery partition scenarios see the Recommended Configuration: System Recovery.

Step #3: Boot from the USB drive

To boot from USB on the Surface Pro you must do the following:

Press and hold the volume down button

Press the power button

When you see the Surface Logo you can let go of the buttons

If it doesn’t boot from the USB drive check the following:

Make sure you have formatted the drive FAT32

Try the USB drive in another computer(UEFI and Legacy BIOS) to see if it works

Here is autounattend.xml.

Hope this helps with your deployments. Stay tuned for more Surface Pro deployment related blogs

Scott McArthur
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Customer Support & Services

New Network Name Resource Fails to come Online

Windows Server Core Team — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:31:20 GMT

I recently encountered an issue involving the failure of a new Network Name resource to come online. Doing some investigation I found a number of instances where this has been encountered, with different resolutions provided. Since no root cause was defined, fellow Directory Services Engineer Robert Williams and I set out to determine the cause.

You’ll know you’ve encountered this issue if you create a new Network Name resource and it fails to online with the following errors:

In the System Event log you will see a Failover Cluster event 1194:

Log Name: System

Source: Microsoft-Windows-FailoverClustering

Date: 3/27/2013 1:19:07 PM

Event ID: 1194

Task Category: Network Name Resource

Level: Error

Keywords:

User: SYSTEM

Computer: ComputerName

Description:

Cluster network name resource 'ComputerName' failed to create its associated computer object in domain 'DomainName' for the following reason: Unable to obtain access to Computer Object in DS.

The text for the associated error code is: Access is denied.

Please work with your domain administrator to ensure that:

The cluster identity 'CNO' can create computer objects. By default all computer objects are created in the 'Computers' container; consult the domain administrator if this location has been changed.

The quota for computer objects has not been reached.

If there is an existing computer object, verify the Cluster Identity 'CNO' has 'Full Control' permission to that computer object using the Active Directory Users and Computers tool.

In the Cluster log you will see the following entries:

00000ea4.000012b0::2013/03/25-16:55:04.113 ERR [RES] Network Name < NetworkName>: Failed to obtain access to computer account < AccountName>, status 80070005

00000ea4.000012b0::2013/03/25-16:55:04.128 ERR [RHS] Online for resource <NetworkName> failed.

Note: To generate a Cluster log, run the following command from an administrators command prompt. The Cluster.log file will be generated in the c:\windows\cluster\reports directory. The entry will be in the Cluster log on the Node where the online attempt failed.

Cluster log /gen

We determined that the root cause of the issue is due to the removal of NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users from the local Users group. Note below that it is present by default:

The best solution is to add back NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated to the local Users Group. This will require a reboot for the change to take effect. If your security team is unwilling to do this, you can disable the following two Security policies and refresh the policy by running gpupdate /force:

Network access: Do not allow anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts

Network access: Do not allow anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts and shares

You will have to determine which of these two options best fits the security requirements for your environment. It may be a good option to create a separate Organizational Unit (OU) for your Cluster servers. This will allow you to affect the preferred change to the limited subset of servers.

Steven Andress

Senior Support Escalation Engineer

Microsoft Customer Support & Services

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update1 Media Deployment USB drive for UEFI computer

Windows Server Core Team — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:55:13 GMT

In today’s blog I am going to cover an issue related to using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update1 to deploy an image to Surface Pro using media deployment point.

Notes:

This issue is not specific to Surface Pro and could occur with other UEFI computers.
This may be addressed in later version of MDT

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update1 creates its media deployment folder that looks like the following:

Figure 1. MDT 2012 Update 1 Media Deployment

Normally you would prepare the USB drive using the steps outlined in the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Documentation Library under “Create Bootable Devices from Deployment Media”. Basically formatting the drive using NTFS then copying everything in the Content folder to the drive and boot from it.

When booting from USB flash drive or hard drive on a UEFI computer the boot files must reside on a FAT32 partition. FAT32 has an individual file size limitation of 4GB. Most times custom images are going to be >4GB so you will have to work around this by using a drive that reports itself as Fixed so you create multiple partitions.

To do this you must first use the steps outlined in Option #2 in the following blog to prepare the drive:

Creating bootable USB drives for UEFI computers

After locating the correct drive and preparing it you must use the following steps to copy the MDT media deployment files to it:

Assumptions:

Assume that your media deployment is created in C:\media
The FAT32 partition has volume label of BOOT
The NTFS partition has volume label of DEPLOY
Windows 7 is not supported on Surface Pro so you must be deploying Windows 8

Copy files to BOOT drive(FAT32)

Copy c:\media\content\boot folder to root of the BOOT drive
Copy c:\media\content\efi folder to root of the BOOT drive
Copy c:\media\content\autorun.inf, bootmgr, bootmgr.efi to root of the BOOT drive
Create Deploy folder in root of the BOOT drive
Copy c:\media\content\deploy\boot to Deploy folder in the BOOT drive

Copy files to DEPLOY Partition(NTFS)

Copy c:\media\content\deploy folder to root of the DEPLOY drive

To boot from the USB drive on a Surface Pro you need to Press and Hold the Volume Down button and then press the power button. Once you see the Surface logo you can let go and it should boot from the USB drive.

Hope this helps with your deployments.

Scott McArthur
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Customer Support & Services

Live Customer Q&A with Virtualization Experts! (Microsoft Virtual Academy)

John Marlin [MSFT] — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 11:34:00 GMT

The IT Pro Evangelism team, Microsoft Learning and the Microsoft Virtual Academy are pleased to announce the next FREE & PUBLIC event Live Q&A: Introduction to Hyper-V on Wednesday April 3^rd, from 8:30 am – 10:00am PST with virtualization experts Jeff Woolsey (Principal Program Manager) & Symon Perriman (Senior Technical Evangelist).

Ask your customers to join this live online event designed for IT professionals that have questions about Microsoft virtualization and want to learn about Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Register here: http://aka.ms/MVAf-HyperV. If you cannot make the live event, sign up anyway so you can receive a notification when the recording is published on the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Topics and demos may include:

Introduction to Microsoft Virtualization
Hyper-V Infrastructure
Hyper-V Networking
Hyper-V Storage
Hyper-V Management
Hyper-V High Availability and Live Migration
Integration with System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager
Integration with Other System Center 2012 Components

Tweet: Ask us your questions about #Windows #Sever 2012 #HyperV! Register for this live free public Q&A event on April 3rd: http://aka.ms/MVAf-HyperV

Also check out our recent full day training Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals Jump Start which is now available on the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Logical Processor count changes after enabling Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2012

Windows Server Core Team — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:35:02 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Today we are going to talk about Processor changes in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V servers. Hyper-V in Windows Server® 2012 supports significantly larger configurations of virtual and physical components than in previous releases of Hyper-V. This capacity enables virtualizing high performance, scale-up workloads.

Well, we will not talk about performance and scalability in depth but an interesting change in Hyper-V on Windows Server® 2012. A Windows Server® 2012 running Hyper-V can support up to 320 Logical Processors and 64 Virtual Processors for each Virtualized partition (Virtual machine). That being said, if we have a Server 2012 with Hyper-V enabled running on a Hardware with 10 processors having 4 core each and Hyper threading enabled (Long story short - Hardware with 80 Logical Processors) you will see that only 64 Logical Processors will be assigned for the host.

Here is how it looks in Task Manager on a Windows Server 2012 with no Hyper-V role enabled

After enabling the Hyper-V role on the server you will see something like below. A new entry gets added called "Host Logical Processors" and will have a value of 64. This is the number of logical processors that are assigned to the Host Operating System. Also notice that the value of “Logical processors” did not change.

This does not mean that the remaining processors will not be used. They will still be used for Virtual machines running on the Server.

What changed?

This behavior is due to architectural changes in Hyper-V 2012 Server which has been designed to support 320 Logical Processors.

Hypervisor Early Launch

In Windows Server® 2008 and Windows Server® 2008 R2 the OS in the parent partition booted first and then launches the Hypervisor via driver hvboot.sys. But in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 we do an early launch of the Hypervisor before the OS in the parent partition. The Hypervisor initializes the BSP, applies any microcode update needed and enables the virtualization. The OS in the parent partition is booted on a Virtual Processor.

Minimal Parent Hypervisor

The Parent partition will run no more than 64 Virtual Processors regardless of the number of Logical Processors present in the system and this value is NOT user-configurable. The hypervisor continues to manage all Logical Processors, schedule guest Virtual Processors on all Processors etc.

Why was this implemented?

Managing more than 64 VPs presents a scalability bottleneck.

Beyond 64 logical processors, the parent should not need more VPs to handle I/O for the system

NOTE: With 64 logical processors the Parent Partition has been tested and demonstrated that it can handle over 1 million IOP’s and the sustained CPU utilization in Task Manager showed between 20-25%. In short with 64 cores in the Parent Partition is more the adequate to handle the I/O load.

Santosh Vavilal
Support Engineer
Windows Core Team, Microsoft Enterprise Platforms

Keith Hill
Sr. Support Escalation Engineer and the Hyper-V Support Topic Owner.
Windows Core Team, Microsoft Enterprise Platforms