SmartDeploy Enterprise provides a simple yet robust solution to OS deployment. This second of two articles covers the last three steps in the SmartDeploy process: driver packaging, PE media creation, and image deployment.

SmartDeploy is raffling off 50 end-point licenses with 1 year of basic support (value $1610 USD). The deadline for this contest is June 1, 2012. If you want a chance at winning this license, please fill out this form.

SmartDeploy Enterprise is a powerfully simple deployment suite. In fact, it is so simple that the entire process can be summed up in five steps, with steps 1 and 2 being covered in the previous post. In short, the steps are:

1. Building the image
2. Capturing the image
3. Packaging the drivers
4. Creating the PE media
5. Deploying the image

We have already built and captured our image. Now we face a humongous hurdle with driver management. In nearly every organization, model sprawl reigns. Even in organizations where machines are regularly replaced, some department will buy a make and model that wasn’t previously supported. This is the area where SmartDeploy Enterprise really shines.

(more…)

SmartDeploy Enterprise provides a simple yet robust solution to OS deployment. Their five-step solution makes image management a breeze. In this first part, I will cover image building and image capture.

SmartDeploy is raffling off 50 end-point licenses with 1 year of basic support (value $1610 USD). The deadline for this contest is June 1, 2012. If you want a chance at winning this license, please fill out this form.

SmartDeploy Enterprise Architecture

(more…)

In my last post, I discussed a few preflight checks that I recommend for Windows deployments. This post explains the code of my VBScript script that helps you with this task for Windows XP deployments.

The script itself is a basic HTML Application (HTA) with lots of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) calls to check various hardware properties. The pseudo-code is:

Initialize the HTA
   Function Run Preflight Check
   Check the make (vendor)
   Check the model (is in a text list)
   Check RAM is above value x
   Check HDD is not RAW
  Check CPU architecture<
End

(more…)

Before you deploy a new Windows image, you should always perform a few preflight checks. This article gives an overview of the topic. In the next article, I discuss a script that helps you with this task.

What are preflight checks?

When you start a Windows deployment, once you are happy with the image it’s time to deploy it. However, there are quite a few obstacles to overcome that can stop your deployment at the first hurdle. For instance, what if the target disk is encrypted? Deployments only work with NTFS owing to the use of WinPE, so deployment will fail unless you format the disk. There is a whole list of prerequisites to think about. The main areas to address before deploying an OS to a machine are listed in Table 1 – Requirements overview.

Table 1 – Requirements overview

(more…)

The third part in this series about MDT (Microsoft deployment toolkit) covers the basics of Windows deployment.

MDT Workbench

MDT has two main sections within the Workbench: Information Center and Deployment Shares. Information Center contains links to documentation, online links (news), and components, where you download software. The other section is where you can create, populate, and manage deployment shares.

MDT 2012 workbench

(more…)

The second part of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) series describes all the things you need to get started with OS deployment.

Before you even bother installing MDT, I suggest you install the MDT prerequisites listed in the following table, in order. For XP, you also need to install PowerShell.

MDT requirements

(more…)

This series in three parts gives an overview of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to get started quickly with this free OS deployment toolset.

MDT and WAIK

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is Microsoft’s core tool to automate installing a Windows OS for desktops, servers, and portable or even virtual machines. Ironically, the first thing to about MDT is that it is an iceberg product; underneath the water is 1GB of code from Microsoft called the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK, pronounced “wake”). The WAIK does the bulk of the heavy lifting. MDT itself is a lightweight (25MB) standalone Microsoft management console (mmc) based tool with a comprehensive deployment guide in help-file format.

MDT and WAIK tools

(more…)

In this second part of two I will describe some technical details of ManageEngine Desktop Central 7 and give an overview of the tool's systems management features.

Role-based access control

Desktop Central 7 uses a role-based access control (RBAC) motif in which you can log into the system as a full-fledged administrator or as one of a series of dedicated sub-administrative roles, including the following:

• Patch Manager
• Auditor
• Asset Manager
• Remote Desktop Technician

Once you are logged in as an administrator, Desktop Central offers you a plethora of administrative action options for managed devices; some of these are shown in the screenshot below.

Desktop Central 7 administrative options

(more…)

This is the second of a two-part guide about OS deployment tools. Today's post focusses on driver deployment tools.

If you need to deploy a build to more than one model of hardware, you are going to have to download, install and manage dozens of device drivers. There are three challenges at this point: identifying all the unknown devices, installing the correct driver for each, and then capturing all the details. The result forms a master driver repository to document the drivers for each model that you import to MDT or SCCM. As there is nothing in the WAIK or MDT to help, I’ve collected my own toolkit. I use NirSoft’s DevManView for identifying devices and Double Driver to help create a backup repository.

DevManView

Driver deployment tool DevManView

(more…)

This is the first of a two-part guide to collecting several OS deployment tools.

Build overview

When you begin the journey into learning how to deploy a Microsoft Operating System, you quickly realise that although Microsoft provides tools that improve all the time, they leave two main gaps: WIM management and driver management. Before continuing, I want to define the core steps of any OS build:

1. Create a baseline OS on a reference machine (aka gold, reference or master machine).
2. Save it as an image.
3. Deploy the build, installing drivers on the fly as needed.
4. Optional – install applications silently.

Base lining your Reference machine

The first task of creating a “build”, given business specifications, is to install the raw OS that you have configured to meet that specification. You then capture this as the baseline image. You can do this capture in several ways, but the easiest is free: Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT).

(more…)

This post is a short tutorial for the alternative WPKG client WPKG-GP. It allows you to remotely install software via Group Policy.

Now that we have configured WPKG on the server side, all that remains to be done, is to tell our client system to run the WPKG script (with administrator privileges). WPKG should then manage our software as per our config files. Whereas the WPKG project does provide a client, I prefer to use the alternative WPKG-GP client.

The reason I prefer WPKG-GP is that it hooks into the startup process via Group Policy extensions, and runs WPKG before users have a chance to login, so you don’t need to worry about applications being open when you are trying to upgrade them.

Once you downloaded WPKG-GP, run the setup, and install all components. For simplicity we will enable local policies, although it is possible to configure WPKG-GP via Group Policy. During the setup process you will need to browse to the file share where you copied the WPKG files to. The final screen of the installer will ask you for an account that has permissions to connect to the WPKG share. I suggest creating a dedicated account for WPKG for this.  Don’t forget to give this account read access to your WPKG share!

(more…)

Rate this tool: (5 votes, average: 4.20 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Submit a free admin tool | Free admin tools index | Browse free admin tools

WPKG is an Open Source software deployment tool that allows you to install software, upgrade and remove applications on remote Windows computers.

The great thing about WPKG is that it doesn’t require any infrastructure other than an SMB network share, oh, and it’s free! To follow this introductory tutorial to WPKG, head over to the download page to get the latest version of WPKG, unzip the file and copy hosts.xml, packages.xml, profiles.xml and wpkg.js to C:\WPKG or a location of your choice. You should also share this folder, as you will need to access it over the network.

WPKG configuration files

The wpkg.js file is the main engine of WPKG. It first looks through the various XML configuration files, and then runs any required commands to install, upgrade or remove software from your client systems.

So-called profiles are defined in profiles.xml. A profile basically contains a list of software packages that will be installed on the remote system.

(more…)

Rate this tool: (5 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Submit a free admin tool | Free admin tools index | Browse free admin tools

In my last article, we walked through the setup of Windows Deployment Services and deployed Windows 7 to our client systems. In this article we will build upon this setup, by making these deployments happen in an unattended manner.

Unattended deployment of Windows 7 means that you won’t have to wait around clicking ‘next’ all the time – you can just start the deployment off and forget about it!

We automate the deployments by loading ‘answer files’ into Windows Deployment Services (WDS). As the name suggests, these files contain the answers to setup questions along with the ability to set a number of additional options too. Answer files are in an XML format, and generated by the Windows System Image Manager application. In order to obtain the Windows System Image Manager you will need to download and install the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) – although it’s quite a hefty download at around 1GB!

There are two answer files that we will need to create, as we have two stages of our deployment – the WDS client from the boot image and then the main Windows 7 installation image. Windows System Image Manager will need to create a catalogue file beside the WIM file, so copy the install.wim from your Windows 7 media to somewhere with write access (thisstep will fail if you attempt to open them directly from a DVD!). The WIM file is located in the sources folder of the Windows 7 installation media. (D:\sources\install.wim)

(more…)

In this first article in a series of four, we will setup and configure Windows Deployment Services (WDS) to deploy Windows 7 across our network.

As a systems administrator, your time is probably quite precious, you don’t really have time to be juggling DVD’s around and watching progress bars to install operating systems and applications on each workstation. Over the next few articles I will take you through deploying operating systems and applications automatically over your network.

There are a few prerequisites that we must have in place before we start with this walkthrough. Firstly, we will need a functioning Active Directory setup, with DNS and DHCP. The server we use for Windows Deployment Services will also require an NTFS partition for its file store. Our client systems need to support PXE (Network) booting, and finally we will require some installation media to load onto our deployment server –in my examples I will be using the 32bit Windows 7 SP1 DVD.

We start by adding the Windows Deployment Services role to your server – click ‘Add roles’ from server manager, select Windows deployment services, and install both of the role services. You should reboot your server after the installation of the WDS role.

(more…)

WMI Explorer allows you to browse WMI classes, objects and their properties and execute any WMI query.

This is part three of a three part series of articles covering two great WMI tools, the second and final tool being WMI Explorer.

WMI Explorer v1.10 is another lightweight (at 533KB), portable tool. To demonstrate its abilities I need to use WMI to find something I don’t already know and without using any books or the web. My example is to list the games I have installed and the path. The first step is to connect to a different namespace, as in the screenshot below.

WMI Explorer – Connecting to different namespaces

(more…)

Rate this tool: (3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Submit a free admin tool | Free admin tools index | Browse free admin tools