64 bit Native VHD Deployment [3]

I have just completed making our laptop image (also 64 bit) and that is to be tested shortly. I used MDT to make the previous deploy but now I am switching to native VHD as well. It looks like the laptop VHD is OK and there are no problems. So this means we can ditch MDT altogether and just use native VHD for everything (as we don’t use MDT for XP) except older Ghost stuff (XP). MDT is much more complex. It has its place if you do a lot of imaging and want to have fewer images with customisations to various types of hardware handled automatically. If you have only a few images and just want a simpler deployment method then nVHD is just an update on Windows AIK that means your deployment is just a simple file copy of the VHD file instead of applying a WIM. So updating the image is a much simpler process overall of just replacing the VHD file with the new one. At some future point I will detail how to do this practically as we do it.

The laptop image was deployed successfully although there seem to be issues with x64 Sysprep with the answer file because that wizard that comes up at first boot has six pages now instead of three. In the process of testing the laptop image I updated it to add the recently released SP1 of Windows 7 and had to install an additional software package. The deployment of the computer suite image has also been successful and it also is being updated to SP1 at the moment along with some minor tweaks.

When we transfer staff from their old laptop to the new one we make a complete image of the hard disk of the old laptop as a backup and then extract their personal files (My Documents etc) from the image. In the past I have used Ghost for this. However these days it is just easier to use the Disk2VHD tool released by the Sysinternals group of Microsoft to make a VHD backup of the HDD instead, which is done online by running it from within Windows. Then there are various ways to open the VHD. My preference is to use the latest version of 7-Zip which can open all sorts of useful formats like VHD, WIM and ISO among others, and it is freeware.

64 bit Native VHD deployment [2], etc

Having completed the deployment of computers for student use the next task is to create the image for staff laptops. At this point we need a boot media for Windows PE x64 and traditionally I would have created a boot CD. But the Windows PE walkthroughs create one that seems to be a waste of time, really slow to boot, apparently running an older version of PE etc etc – so I have decided not to bother any more. The Probook 6550 card reader seems to be unable to boot my SD card so I set up a pen drive as a boot device and it copes with that OK. Pen drives are so much easier to set up than a bootable CD which has to be configured with extra steps to make it bootable and create an ISO file. You don’t need to do this with a UFD, it’s just a matter of copying files to the device after formatting it and away it goes. I have customised Windows PE by using startnet.cmd to start a custom script that maps up a network drive to an installation share which contains other scripts used to perform various tasks related to native VHD boot, which simplifies things a lot.

For the Probook 6550 I have run the HP applications installer over my basic installation VHD and am just about ready to sysprep the image – the next stage after that is driver injection with DISM. Then it will be ready to deploy.

We are now back having reopened yesterday. One of the things we had completed before the earthquake was the installation of Enable’s fibre connection. At the moment we are not switching to it but this might happen in the next few months. The biggest and best is a project to lay fibre between two of our sites. If this happens we can consolidate our servers with one main server and one backup. The current link between sites is using “54 Mbps” wireless (real speed around 15 Mbps) which is very slow and increasingly inadequate when transferring large amounts of data and it makes it necessary to maintain two full spec servers in order to reduce the amount of traffic on the wireless link or to give users a reasonable speed experience.

As I continue to explore the world of AIK, I discovered the Volume Activation Management Tool yesterday. The VAMT is primarily of benefit to those of us who wish to manage MAK license keys, as opposed to the use of KMS. It has been a lot more straightforward to us at the moment to use MAKs because the KMS hosts we set up don’t seem to be getting any activation requests and I haven’t got time to check this out. The VAMT lets me remotely activate computers that require a MAK which I guess would be for both Windows 7 and Office 2010. This means they don’t need to be manually activated.

Also part of the AIK is DISM which I previously mentioned. This works very well most of the time. The main problems being when it can’t unmount a WIM, this in fact happens too often in my view so I hope MS will address the many times as when it refuses to unmount then a reboot is the only option left.

Windows 7 SP1 has been released. There have been some issues which people have discovered when installing it. This seems to be mostly from using WSUS. Unfortunately DISM can’t be used to apply it offline. I wonder if this is yet another example of MS’s stripped support model that seems to be developing for everyone who isn’t using Azure or other cloud services. Everything that MS does these days seems to be geared towards pushing people onto Azure et al, everyone else gets a shrinking level of support on their stuff.

64 bit Native VHD deployment [1]

This is my first post since the big earthquake hit Christchurch on 22nd February. I’m not going to write here on the earthquake itself except to say that we have been closed for the past 14 days and will reopen next week. At the moment I am just picking up where things have been 14 days ago. I was just finishing the preparation of a 64 bit VHD ready for our computer suite. Since our 32 bit VHD deployment was, from a technical viewpoint, successful, I have decided to move things along and use native VHD more as a deployment system. Hence I have started to produce 64 bit native VHDs for our two major deployment imaging requirements: staff laptops and student computers. The idea is that the computer that is running Windows AIK tools that are used to service these images can be running 64 bit Windows OS (in this case Server 2008 R2) and so I don’t need to maintain a 32 bit OS VM to service 32 bit images as is the requirement when using x86 images. Therefore I can store the images on the network shares of the server itself without having to copy them to the 32 bit VM to use DISM on a local disk as it won’t work on a network drive.

The second reason for building new images is to get around the Sysprep Rearm limit as detailed in my last posting. The 32 bit laptop images in particular were subject to this limit because they had been sysprepped multiple times. Therefore a new 64 bit image has to be built from scratch which is copied before it is sysprepped. My first attempt to build a VHD attached to a Hyper-V VM failed rather spectacularly when it came to the point where it had to be loaded onto the target platform (to install platform specific applications). It got partway into the boot screen (the point where the Windows 7 logo gets drawn from various moving parts) and then bluescreened. I poked around trying to debug what was happening but couldn’t work it out even though a Temp folder is put onto the boot drive which appears to contain information to help tracking down the problem. I think the issue is that Native VHD is very specialised and as yet not well enough documented beyond the MS group that created it.

So I have started again with building images, this time from scratch on each of the target platforms. The starting point in each case being a generic VHD that had been configured to be dynamically expandable to 127 GB maximum size and loaded with the Windows 7 x64 Ent installation files on it. When the target gets booted to this VHD for the first time it will set up Windows on it. It is not sysprepped, it just acts like a first time Windows 7 installation for any target platform.

The 64 bit image for our computer suite has been successfully test deployed and so far it looks good. A trial deployment will follow shortly in along with preparing to reopen our computer suite along with the rest of the school. The laptop image will be completed this week as we have to get the new laptops ready (the completion of this was deferred due to the earthquake). The tricky thing however about Windows PE is that I will need to create 64 bit boot media or use a MDT 64 bit boot CD that I already have. So my SD card will have to be updated to a 64 bit edition of Windows PE, including net card driver injection. This is mainly because BCDBOOT comes in 32 bit and 64 bit editions and therefore the 32 bit Windows PE image can’t run BCDBOOT which is needed to set up the BCD when creating a new system from scratch.