Chris's Blog - Just weedin around Microsoft

Configuration Manager 2012: Package Conversion Manager 2.0 Released

2013-01-15T18:43:31Z

The System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 released today and widely available. With this release, our team has worked really hard to ensure that we update and support Configuration Manager 2012 Service Pack 1 for our application migration tool called Package Conversion Manager (PCM). We originally released PCM to support RTM of ConfigMgr 2012 and due to changes made in service pack 1 we had to update PCM to support those changes. I’m happy to announce that Package Conversion Manager...(read more)

Kicking the tires for Configuration Manager 2012’s Package Conversion Manager (PCM)

2012-10-08T03:32:00Z

In the past few months, we’ve received a lot of requests to help many of you focus on “testing” the new Package Conversion Manager (PCM) that is available in the Microsoft Download Center . It is rather trivial to actually download PCM and install in your production environment yet for many it is very scary to do so. You *can* safely do this without concerns as we do not modify any System Center Configuration Manager 2012 database settings during install. Instead, we simply update...(read more)

ConfigMgr 2012 PCM: Walking through PCM Plug-In capabilities

2012-09-12T20:56:00Z

In the complicated and dynamic world of applications, Enterprises continued to find unique and interesting ways to approach software delivery with System Center Configuration Manager. During the development of Package Conversion Manager (PCM), we quickly determined that one area that was ripe for investment was in helping customers to take advantage of PCM when using custom wrappers. Custom wrappers are defined as non-MSI based capabilities such as scripts or executable that usually provide capabilities...(read more)

Introducing Package Conversion Manager (PCM) 2.0 Beta: ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 Support

2012-09-11T17:59:40Z

As I’ve outlined in the past, System Center Configuration Manager 2012 and Package Conversion Manager (PCM) are very tightly integrated. This integration creates a situation whereby any major updates to the ConfigMgr 2012 product requires the PCM team to update PCM. Yesterday, our team released the PCM 2.0 Beta that aims at fully supporting ConfigMgr SP1 Beta which released as well. It goes without saying that we would like to have everyone who is working with SP1 to please download the...(read more)

SCVMM 2012: A Frustrating Library that just will not go away! Forcibly Removing it

2012-09-06T22:56:12Z

We recently had a situation with our System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) that literally frustrated the crap out of me. Don’t take that wrong, the product didn’t really cause the frustration instead it was the mis-use of the libraries in 2012 that did . You see, you live & learn and when we originally setup our Development Cloud in 2012, we hacked together the libraries to allow the most flexibility. You should read that as saying – we didn’t RTFM before we embarked on...(read more)

Introducing User-Driven Install (UDI) for MDT 2012 Update 1

2012-08-21T18:08:41Z

Our engineering team has had an amazing journey this past year with two key releases to help our customers improve their capabilities for deploying Windows in their enterprises. As you know, we released Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 in April of this year to coincide with the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) and this enabled a lot of functionality asked for by you. These are outlined in this post I made back around this release and include an all-new extensible wizard, all-new...(read more)

Disaster: Sector “0” Blanked for Cluster CSV, VMM Incomplete Configuration

2012-08-06T15:00:00Z

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of living through a living hell whereby I was wondering what exactly would happen when our development engineering team had to figure out how to rebuild 53+ virtual machines hosted on a Failover Cluster with Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) enabled. The first question is why don’t you have backups and I will tell you we do but let me talk about what I believe is the perfect storm of irony. In today’s post, I will walk you through this scenario so you can...(read more)

Extending User-Driven Installation (UDI) in MDT 2012

2012-08-04T00:36:13Z

A key pillar in our rebuilt User-driven installation for MDT 2012 was to remove the monolithic approach and focus on building an extensible, lego-set approach to our UDI Wizard & Designer. This is an important feature that allows developers, and some IT professionals with coding abilities, to effectively create new pages to meet the dynamic environments each of you live in every day. For MDT 2012 UDI, we have several personas who can uniquely contribute to the success of deploying...(read more)

Learning MDT 2012’s User-Driven Installation (UDI)

2012-07-27T00:14:04Z

After spending a lot of time talking to customers after we integrated code-name “Modena” into the powerful, and enterprise-ready Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 , it was obvious that our engineering team needed to spend some dedicated effort in helping customers get the right training for implementing User-driven Installation (UDI). I outlined in a previous post the key tenants that defined the MDT 2012 UDI release such as deep investments in extensibility across all of UDI as well expanding...(read more)

MDT 2012 User Driven Installation (UDI) Drill-down at MMS 2012

2012-04-16T16:54:03Z

I’ve arrived. The wheels are down here in Las Vegas and I’m getting pretty excited. I’m participating in a few sessions this week and I wanted to talk through some of the things to expect if you attend our MDT 2012 User-Driven Installation (UDI) talk. In MDT 2012 UDI, which is currently released as a Release Candidate 1 , we’ve completely re-vamped UDI to provide you maximum flexibility. Deploying Windows at the enterprise is super flexible in your options making it rather...(read more)

MMS 2012: 1 Session & 100’s of Customers Conversations

2012-03-13T20:57:46Z

It’s that time of the year! The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) has moved back to its favored home at “The Venetian Hotel” and at the moment is an absolute sold out house. This conference ranks high upon my list of favorites as it provides everything the IT professional desires – System Center in’s & out’s, do’s and don’ts, and a whole lot more. It’s Vegas after all, ya know? In this year’s conference, you will learn about the great work our division is doing to enable Private...(read more)

Upgrading to Windows 8 Consumer Preview Just Got Easier–Using VHD Tools to P2V

2012-03-12T16:25:28Z

As you already know, Windows 8 Consumer Preview hit the market just over a week ago. The 1 million downloads in the first day sheds some light on the demand and I’m sure that many of you are clambering to get it on your devices and find out what all the buzz is about. Same here. The risk for me is that I wanted to upgrade my Lenevo T420s to Windows 8 but I was fearful of it causing a strong delay in my ability to get my job done. Why? This laptop is my work laptop and I depend...(read more)

Introducing Package Conversion Manager (PCM) Scheduled Package Analyzer

2012-01-19T19:00:00Z

In Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC2, we added a feature called Scheduled Package Analyzer (SPA) to assist customers in automating the analysis process for your migrated packages/programs. This feature gives administrators a lot of flexibility on when they analysis is run based on when the usage is low on the infrastructure. This was outlined briefly in my post yesterday. In today’s post, I’ve asked a developer from the PCM engineering team to provide us an in-depth view into SPA so...(read more)

Announcing Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC2 for Configuration Manager 2012

2012-01-18T20:51:11Z

Back in November 2011, I announced that our team had reached a critical milestone of releasing the System Center Configuration Manager Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC1 feature pack. The engineering team that I oversee spent a great deal of time working closely with the Configuration Manager engineering team to ensure that this tool was a logical extension of Configuration Manager 2012 and that administrators had a seamless experience for moving packages/programs to the powerful application...(read more)

Provisioning your Private Cloud in VMM 2012–Getting Started 101

2012-01-17T03:13:00Z

In our group, we have several highly-available sets of clusters that service various needs. We have one cluster dedicated to running our Team Foundation Services (TFS) and all the System Center management infrastructure to support all clusters. These clusters include our Development teams cluster (we do test, etc. here), our VDI cluster (where many of our developers house a VDI Windows 7 workstation with Aero-enabled), and soon we will have a Test cluster for ensuring that we have the...(read more)

VMM 2012: How I got EMC Clariion AX4-5 Working with VMM Storage Mgmt Service

2011-11-21T05:02:26Z

As I’ve started exploring System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 , the first task I took as an action item is to learn how to configure active management for our engineering EMC Clariion AX4-5 . I’ve personally been slacking a bit in getting VMM 2012 up & running. As you probably have seen, we’ve been busy focusing on some other tools to help Configuration Manager 2012 customers. I wanted to first start off by seeing how difficult it is to get the new VMM Storage Management...(read more)

Using Package Conversion Manager (PCMs) Fix & Convert–Moving Manual Readiness Packages

2011-11-17T06:13:18Z

In today’s post, I wanted to take some time to outline to ConfigMgr administrators how to effectively use a key feature that is in Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC released last week . Beyond the US – English release , we also released the international versions of PCM – German | Simplified Chinese for administrators wanting to support PCM in the native language they use the console in. You can download these bits here. Ok, enough of that… let’s talk about the Fix & Convert feature...(read more)

MDT 2012 Beta 2–User-Driven Installation (UDI) Version 2

2011-11-14T18:38:30Z

Since the release of MDT 2010 Update 1 , our User-Driven Installation (UDI) engineering team has worked extremely hard at making the use of UDI much simpler for administrators and end-users to use. This is the founding principle, or pillar, we focused on this past year. This hard work of our team was made available to you in Beta form last Thursday . Today, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking to you about the key areas that we spent significant amounts of engineering effort...(read more)

ConfigMgr 2012: Package Conversion Manager (PCM) & Readiness State

2011-11-10T01:20:49Z

In today’s post, I wanted to take a little bit of time to build a bit deeper on the underlying principles of the “Readiness” state for Package Conversion Manager (PCM) as it is the fundamental to understand. My colleague, Cameron King, outlined in his blog titled “ Package Conversion Manager Readiness States & Rules ” the actual reasons one package/program might end up in a particular rule. What I wanted to take a moment today and explain is the design principles taken in building these...(read more)

ConfigMgr 2012: Introducing Package Conversion Manager (PCM) for Seamless Migration to AppModel

2011-11-07T10:00:00Z

For the past 15 months, our engineering team has spent a great deal of time partnering with the System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) team building a feature pack called Package Conversion Manager . As many know, ConfigMgr 2012 introduces a powerful shift in how you as a administrator will manage software in your enterprise. The next generation App Model offers brand new concepts such as Applications (virtual container that describes information about the content), Deployment...(read more)

TFS 2010 RTM: Builds Fail with Library Mismatch - Windows Update Breaks TFS Build Services

2011-10-11T03:28:56Z

We recently ran into a problem whereby all of our build definitions started failing, mysteriously. We had a few developers investigating what was occurring and we did see that we were having issues with namespace mismatches. This issue baffled us as we’d not made any changes to our build server. After working with our internal TFS team and Northwest Cadence (our resident TFS experts), we discovered that a recent .NET Framework update broke us. We were running TFS “Gold” (RTM) and hadn’t jumped to...(read more)

Changing Hyper-V Cluster Virtual IP Address (VIP) After Layer 3 Changes

2011-09-16T23:47:53Z

We recently had a change take place in our engineering lab that included a large set of layer 3 changes (IP, VLANs , Subnets, etc.) that caused us some downtime. Although most of the issues are well documented, I found though that there was one that simply plagued me in finding the resolution. This was primarily due to the fact that the user experience for Failover Cluster Manager hid this information somewhat. In today’s post, I’m going to share with you what I had to do to effectively...(read more)

VhdCapture & VhdPrep: Using these tools to P2V your physical server to USB, Network Share

2011-09-09T21:59:00Z

In today’s post, I want to spend some time sharing how to use the virtualization tools that our team (MPSD Development) built as part of the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit (ConfigMgr P2V). In previous posts , I shared how ConfigMgr customers could utilize the toolkit for migration purposes as well as sharing how others can take advantage of some of the features for those who are not ConfigMgr customers (shame on you!) The underlying libraries our team built include...(read more)

Using WinPE Creator to Create Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) of your physical server

2011-09-01T20:49:57Z

In the past two posts , I’ve focused on the first two capabilities provided in the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit . The primary scenario for this toolkit is to offer customers the ability to virtualize their physical servers when they don’t readily have System Center Virtual Machine Manager available. As mentioned, our P0 scenario was to ensure that users could do this virtualization without requiring any additional hardware. Beyond this, the goal was...(read more)

Creating Stand-alone Media to Deploy Windows Server 2008 that Captures Physical Host

2011-08-30T23:13:50Z

The entire goal of the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit is to, as I outlined in my previous post , is to “flip” the physical server with no need for additional hardware. I outlined in “ Using ConfigMgr Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) Migration Toolkit’s “Action Pad” to build Task Sequence” post I shared how to effectively build a task sequence that orchestrates the creation of a Task Sequence in ConfigMgr that is deployable via an advertisement (or deployment) or stand...(read more)