Ask the Core Team

TechEd 2013 Presentations and Videos Ask the Core Team favorites

John Marlin [MSFT] — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:41:00 GMT

Today’s blog is a listing of our favorite videos and presentations that recently occurred at TechEd 2013. I have gone through them and picked what we think are the most important to the technologies our team supports.

Deployment/Client
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 R2
Azure
For Fun

For a full list of the presentations take a look at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013

Deployment/Client

· Building the Perfect Windows 8 Image: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B305

· Replacing BIOS with UEFI Deployment: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B337

· Advanced Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Customizations: Dueling MDT Enhancements: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B302

· Windows in the Enterprise: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/FDN07

· What’s new with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update 1: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B347

· Windows Store Apps: Enterprise LOB App Deployment Scenarios: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B358

· Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Windows, But Were Afraid to Ask: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B201

· Windows RT in the Enterprise: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B357

· What's New in Windows 8 Deployment: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B349

· Windows 8 Deployment Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update 1 and Microsoft System Center..: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-H209

· Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-H206

Windows Server 2012

· Overview of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B338

· Cluster in a Box in 2013: How Real Customers Are Making Their Businesses Highly-Available with Windows Server 2012: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B336

· Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Storage Performance: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B345

· The Top Ten New Features You Really Care about in Windows Server 2012: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B207

· Failover Cluster Networking Essentials: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B337

· Windows Server 2012 Deployment and Ongoing Management: Why Server Core Is Right for You: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B339

· Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster Disaster Recovery: Everything You Need to Know to Prepare and Successfully Recover: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B355

· Practical Implementation of Windows Server 2012 Storage Technologies: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B391

Windows Server 2012 R2

· Introduction to Windows Server 2012 R2: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B205

· Windows Server 2012 R2 Clustering: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/C9-22

· Deploying Windows Server 2012 R2 File Services for Exceptional $/IOPS: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B217

· Continuous Availability: Deploying and Managing Clusters Using Windows Server 2012 R2: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B305

· Storage and Availability Improvements in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B333

· Hyper-V – What’s New in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B330

· Storage Spaces: What’s New in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B218

· Deep Dive on Hyper-V Network Virtualization in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B380

Azure

· Crash Course on Automating Deployments in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. How and Which Tools?: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B405

· Take Control of the Cloud with the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WAD-B305

· Windows Azure Internals: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WAD-B402

· Getting the Most out of Windows Azure Storage: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WAD-B406

· Infrastructure Services on Windows Azure: Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks with Mark Russinovich: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B212

· Best Practices from Real Customers: Deploying to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B361

For FunJ

· Sysinternals Primer: TechEd 2013 Edition: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/ATC-B313

· Case of the Unexplained 2013: Windows Troubleshooting with Mark Russinovich: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/WCA-B306

Scott McArthur
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Support

Nodes being removed from Failover Cluster membership on VMWare ESX?

Windows Server Core Team — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:35:07 GMT

Welcome to the AskCore blog. Today, we are going to talk about nodes being removed from active Failover Cluster membership when the nodes are hosted on VMWare ESX. I have documented node membership problems in a previous blog:

Having a problem with nodes being removed from active Failover Cluster membership?
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2012/02/08/having-a-problem-with-nodes-being-removed-from-active-failover-cluster-membership.aspx

This is a sample of the event you will see in the System Event Log in Event Viewer:

One specific problem that I have seen a few times lately is with the VMXNET3 adapters dropping inbound network packets because the inbound buffer is set too low to handle large amounts of traffic. We can easily find out if this is a problem by using Performance Monitor to look at the “Network Interface\Packets Received Discarded” counter.

Once you have added this counter, look at the Average, Minimum and Maximum numbers and if they are any value higher than zero, then the receive buffer needs to be adjusted up for the adapter. This problem is documented in VMWare’s Knowledge Base:

Large packet loss at the guest OS level on the VMXNET3 vNIC in ESXi 5.x / 4.x
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2039495

I hope that this post helps you!

Thanks,

James Burrage
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Windows High Availability Group

MMS 2013 Hands On Labs Available

John Marlin [MSFT] — Wed, 29 May 2013 21:02:00 GMT

A few months ago we held the annual 2013 Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. As in years past, the event sold out quickly and it was a very busy week. To everyone that attended, our sincere thanks. As a recap, the below blog gives you the list of available sessions online to view that deal with topics covered on the Core Blog site.

Sessions from MMS 2013 Now Available
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/04/23/sessions-from-mms-2013-now-available.aspx

As usual, the hands-on labs and instructor-led labs continue to be some of the most popular offerings at MMS. MMS Labs offer folks the opportunity to kick the tires on a wide array of Microsoft technologies and products. As usual the lines started early. For the fourth year in a row, all of the MMS Labs were 100% virtualized using Windows Server Hyper-V and managed via System Center by our partners at XB Velocity and using HP servers and storage. Of course, this year we upgraded to the latest version so everything was running on a Microsoft Cloud powered by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 SP1.

(BTW, Microsoft blogged about this topic in the past years, if you’re interested, the links are here and here.) Before I jump into the Microsoft Private Cloud, let me provide some context about the labs themselves.

What is a MMS Hand On Lab?

One of the reasons the MMS Hands on Labs are so popular is because it’s a firsthand opportunity to evaluate and work with Windows Server and System Center in a variety of scenarios at your own pace. Here’s a picture of some of the lab stations…

With the hands on labs, we’ve done all the work to create these scenarios based on your areas of interest. So, what does one of these labs look like on the backend? Let’s be clear, none of these labs are a single VM. That’s easy. Been there, done that. When you sit down and request a specific lab, the cloud infrastructure provisions the lab on highly available infrastructure and deploys services that can be anywhere from 4 – 12 virtual machines in your lab in seconds. There are over 650 different lab stations and we have to account for all types of deployment scenarios. For example,

In the first scenario, all users sit down at 8 am and provision exactly the same lab. Or,
In the second scenario, all users sit down at 8 am and provision unique, different labs. Or,
In the third scenario, all users sit down at 8 am and provision a mix of everything

The lab then starts each lab in a few seconds. Let’s take a closer look at what some of the labs look like in terms of VM deployment.

MMS Lab Examples

Let’s start off with a relatively simple lab. This first lab is a Service Delivery and Automation lab. This lab uses:

Four virtual machines
16 virtual processors
15 GB of memory total
280 GB of storage
2 virtual networks

…and here’s what each virtual machine is running…

Interested in creating virtualizing applications to deploy to your desktops, tablets, Remote Desktop Sessions? This next lab is a Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 5.0 Overview lab. This lab uses:

Seven virtual machines

14 virtual processors
16 GB of memory total
192 GB of storage
2 virtual networks

How about configuring a web farm for multi-tenant applications? Here’s the lab which uses:

Six virtual machines
24 virtual processors
16 GB of memory total
190 GB of storage
2 virtual networks

Ever wanted to enable secure remote access with RemoteApp, DirectAccess and Dynamic Access Control? Here’s the lab you’re looking for. This lab uses:

Seven virtual machines

28 virtual processors
18 GB of memory total
190 GB of storage
2 virtual networks

Again, these are just a few of the dozens of labs ready for you at the hands on labs.

MMS 2013 Private Cloud: The Hardware

BTW, before I get to the specifics, let me point out that this Microsoft/HP Private Cloud Solution is an orderable solution available today...

Compute. Like last year, we used two HP BladeSystem c7000s for compute for the cloud infrastructure. Each c7000 had 16 nodes and this year we to upgraded to the latest BL460c Generation 8 Blades. All 32 blades were then clustered to create a 32 node Hyper-V cluster. Each blade was configured with:

Two sockets with 8 cores per socket and thus 16 cores. Symmetric Multi-Threading was enabled and thus we had a total of 32 logical processors per blade.
256 GB of memory per blade with Hyper-V Dynamic Memory enabled
2 local disks 300 GB SAS mirrored for OS Boot per blade
HP I/O Accelerator cards (either 768 GB or 1.2 TB) per blade

Storage. This year we wanted to have a storage backend that could take advantage of the latest storage advancements in Windows Server 2012 (such as Offloaded Data Transfer and SMI-S) so we decided to go with a 3Par StoreServ P10800 storage solution. The storage was configured as a 4 node, scale-out solution using 8 Gb fibre channel and configured with Multi-Path IO and two 16 port FC switches for redundancy. There was a total of 153.6 TB of storage configured with:

64 x 200 GB SSD disks
128 x 600 GB 15k FC disks
32 x 2 TB 7200k RPM SAS

As you can see, the 3Par includes SSD, 15k and 7200k disks. This is so the 3Par can provide automated storage tiering with HP’s Adaptive Optimization. With storage tiering, this ensures the most frequently used storage (the hot blocks) reside in the fastest possible storage tier whether that’s RAM, SSD, 15k or 7200k disks respectively. With storage tiering you can mix and match storage types to find the right balance of capacity and IOPs for you. In short, storage tiering rocks with Hyper-V. From a storage provisioning perspective, both SCVMM and the 3Par storage both support standards based storage management through SMI-S so the provisioning of the 3Par storage was done through System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Very cool.

Networking. From a networking perspective, the solution used VirtualConnect FlexFabric 10Gb/E and everything was teamed using Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming. Once the network traffic was aggregated in software via teaming, that capacity was carved up in software.

Time for the Pictures…

Here’s a picture of the racks powering all of the MMS 2013 Labs. The two racks on the left with the yellow signs are the 3Par storage while the two racks on the right contain all of the compute nodes (32 blades) and management nodes (a two node System Center 2012 SP1 cluster). What you don’t see are the crowds gathered around pointing, snapping pictures, and gazing longingly…

MMS 2013: Management with System Center. Naturally, the MMS team used System Center to manage all the labs, specifically Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Orchestrator, Configuration Manager, and Service Manager. System Center 2012 SP1 was completely virtualized running on Hyper-V and was running on a small two node cluster using DL360 Generation 8 rackmount servers.

Operations Manager was used to monitor the health and performance of all the Hyper-V labs running Windows and Linux. Yes, I said Linux. Linux runs great on Hyper-V (it has for many years now) and System Center manages Linux very well… J To monitor health proactively, we used the ProLiant and BladeSystem Management Packs for System Center Operations Manager. The HP Management Packs expose the native management capabilities through Operations Manager such as:

Monitor, view, and get alerts for HP servers and blade enclosures
Directly launch iLO Advanced or SMH for remote management
Graphical View of all of the nodes via Operations Manager

In addition, 3Par has management packs that plug right into System Center, so Operations Manager was used to manage the 3Par storage as well…

…having System Center integration with the 3Par storage came in handy when one of the drives died and Operations Manager was able to pinpoint exactly what disk failed and in what chassis…

Of course, everything in this Private Cloud solution is fully redundant so we didn’t even notice the disk failure for some time…

In terms of managing the overall solution, here’s a view of some of the real time monitoring we were displaying and where many folks just sat and watched.

Virtual Machine Manager was used to provision and manage the entire virtualized lab delivery infrastructure and monitor and report on all the virtual machines in the system. In addition, HP has written a Virtual Machine Manager plug-in so you can view the HP Fabric from within System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Check this out:

It should go without saying that to support a lab of this scale and with only a few minutes between the end of one lab and the beginning of the next, automation is a key precept. The Hands on Lab team was positively gushing about PowerShell. “In the past, when we needed to provide additional integration it was a challenge. WMI was there, but the learning curve for WMI is steep and we’re system administrators. With PowerShell built-into WS2012, we EASILY created solutions and plugged into Orchestrator. It was a huge time saver.”

MMS 2013: Pushing the limit…

As you may know, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V supports up to 64 nodes and 8,000 virtual machines in a cluster. Well, we have a history for pushing the envelope with this gear and this year was no different. At the very end of the show, the team fired up as many virtual machines to see how high we could go. (These were all lightly loaded as we didn’t have the time to do much more…) On Friday, the team fired up 8,312 virtual machines (~260 VMs per blade) running on a 32 node cluster. Each blade has 256 GB of memory each and we kept turning on VMs until all the memory was consumed.

MMS 2013: More data…

Over the course of the week, over 48,000 virtual machines were provisioned. This is ~8,000 more than last year. Here’s a quick chart. Please note that Friday is just a half day…

Average CPU Utilization across the entire pool of servers during labs hovered around 15%. Peaks were recorded a few times at ~20%. In short, even with thousands of Hyper-V VMs running on a 32 node cluster, we were barely taxing this well architected and balanced system.
While each blade was populated with 256 GB, they weren’t maxed. Each blade can take up to 384 GB.
Storage Admins: Disk queues for each of the hosts largely remained at 1.0 (1.0 is nirvana). When 3200 VMs were deployed simultaneously, the disk queue peaked at 1.3. Read that again. Show your storage admins. (No, those aren’t typos.)
The HP I/O Accelerators used were the 768 GB version and 1.2 TB versions. The only reason we used a mix of different sizes because that’s what we had available.
All I/O was configured for HA and redundancy.
- Network adapters were teamed with Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming
- Storage was fibre channel and was configured with Active-Active Windows Server Multi-Path I/O (MPIO). None of it was needed, but it was all configured, tested and working perfectly.
During one of the busiest days at MMS 2013 with over 3500 VMs running simultaneously, this configuration wasn’t even breathing hard. It’s truly a sight to behold and a testament to how well this Microsoft/HP Private Cloud Solution delivers.

From a management perspective, System Center was the heart of the system providing health monitoring, ensuring consistent hardware configuration and providing the automation that makes a lab this complex successful. At its peak, with over 3500 virtual machines running, you simply can’t work at this scale without pervasive automation.

From a hardware standpoint, the HP BladeSystem and 3Par storage are simply exceptional. Even at peak load running 3500+ virtual machines, we weren’t taxing the system. Not even close. Furthermore, the fact that the HP BladeSystem and 3Par storage integrate with Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager provides incredible cohesion between systems management and hardware. When a disk unexpectedly died, we were notified and knew exactly where to look. From a performance perspective, the solution provides a comprehensive way to view the entire stack. From System Center we can monitor compute, storage, virtualization and most importantly the workloads running within the VMs. This is probably a good time for a reminder…

If you’re creating a virtualization or cloud infrastructure, the best platform for Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server is Microsoft Windows Server with Microsoft Hyper-V managed by Microsoft System Center. This is the best tested, best performing, most scalable solution and is supported end to end by Microsoft.

One More Thing...

Finally, we’ve been talking about Windows Server and System Center as part of our Microsoft Private Cloud Solution. I’d also like to point out that Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is the same rock-solid, high performing and scalable hypervisor we use to power Windows Azure too.

Read that again.

That’s right. Windows Azure is powered by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. See you at TechEd.

P.S. Hope to see you at the Hands on Lab at TechEd!

More pictures below…

Here’s a close up of one of the racks. This rack has one of the c7000 chassis with 16 nodes for Hyper-V. It also includes the two managements heads clustered used for System Center. At the bottom of the rack are the Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

…and here’s the back of one of the racks that held a c7000…

HP knew there was going to be a lot of interest, so they created full size cardboard replicas diagraming the hardware in use.

…and here’s one more…

John Marlin
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Enterprise Platforms Support

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