SCCM client and Provisioning server for Xendesktop

So you've setup your Xendesktop environment with a PVS (Provisioning server) delivered OS and your streaming all your applications with App-V, all is good in the world. Now typically you wouldn't need to manage these clients in the same fashion you would manage your traditional desktops as delivering applications and Os patching are now handled by App-v and PVS, however there are some scenarios where organisations with existing SCCM infrastructure need to continue using some of the SCCM client (configmgr client) functionality such as License monitoring and application targeting.

As you know a pvs standard image can be streamed to multiple hosts simultaneously and is effectively a read only image and all changes made to the image are lost on reboot. Now you may be asking yourself well what about a computers unique computer name and SID, these are handled and assigned by the PVS service and boot time to ensure each host has its own unique attributes.

The same way each computer requires a unique SID each configmrg client / sccm client requires its own unique sms GUID which is generated when the confimrg client is installed. If we did this on our PVS standard image we would end up with multiple clients in the the SCCM console with the same host name and GUID.

To avoid this you can try the following:

1. From your master pvs image in private mode stop the ccmexec service and then delete "c:\windows\SMSCFG.ini" .
2. Put the image back into standard mode
3. Assign a computer shutdown script that copies the c:\windows\smscfg.ini file to you cache drive eg d:\ConfigMrgPersonality\smscfg.ini
4. Assign a computer startup script that copies the smscfg.ini file from you cache drive d:\ConfigMrgPersonality\smscfg.ini to c:\windows\smscfg.ini

If you are fortunate enough to be using appsense you could assign the startup and shutdown scripts via environment manager or assign the copy action on the execution of ccmexec.exe service. Alternatively you could do this with group policy.

Surfs Up: Catch the Google Wave

Google have started sending out its 100,000 invites to Google wave, if you havent received yours (assuming you signed up) be patient as these will be sent out in batches.

If you dont receive an invite and really want one visit ebay as some enterprising individuals have started selling invites ($70 was the last bid I saw)

For those of you wondering why Google has picked up there surfboard and taken to the Austrailan waves (Wave was developed in Sydney Australia), have a read below.

What is Google Wave?

Detailed demo http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video
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Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook() application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

While these are only a few of the many features of Google Wave, it’s easy to see why people are extremely excited.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM) Release Candidate

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) is now available for download on Microsoft Connect, http://connect.microsoft.com

VMM 2008 R2 now complements Windows 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 by supporting the following features.

• Live migration between Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered hosts. With live migration, you can migrate a virtual machine from one node of a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without any downtime. Because the virtual machine does not experience any downtime, the move is completely transparent to the users that are connected to the virtual machine.
• Network optimization detection during virtual machine placement. VMM 2008 R2 supports both Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney, which are Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve network performance for virtual machines.
• Hot addition and removal of virtual hard disks (VHDs). In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V allows users to add and remove VHDs from a virtual machine while it is running.

Quick Storage Migration
For a Windows Server 2008 R2 host or a Storage VMotion-capable host, you can migrate a running virtual machine’s files to a different storage location on the same host with minimal or no service outage. If you use a wizard to migrate a virtual machine to a host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 and you use a network transfer, VMM 2008 R2 now gives you the option to specify separate storage locations for each virtual hard disk (.vhd) file for the virtual machine.

Maintenance Mode for Hosts
In VMM 2008 R2, you can start maintenance mode for a Windows-based host anytime you need to perform maintenance tasks on the host, such as applying updates or replacing a physical component.

When you start maintenance mode on a host in a Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster with highly available virtual machines, you can do one of the following:

If the option is available, use live migration to evacuate all virtual machines to other hosts on the same cluster. If the migration fails for any virtual machine on the host, maintenance mode is not started on that host and VMM does not migrate back the virtual machines that have already migrated.
Place all virtual machines on the host into a saved state.


Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) Support

VMM 2008 R2 supports the Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered shared volume (CSV) feature. CSV enables all hosts on a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to concurrently access virtual machine files on a single shared logical unit number (LUN). Because all nodes on the cluster can access a single shared LUN, virtual machines have complete transparency with respect to which nodes actually own a LUN. This enables live migration of virtual machines within the cluster because all nodes in the cluster can access any LUN.

For anyone who has been running the beta of SCVMM 2008 R2 and doesn’t want to go through the pain of having to install from scratch with the release candidate version Microsoft have release a upgrade utility for the Beta to the RC version . This is also available on connect.

UpgradeV2R2Beta Utility
4258 Utility This is the Beta to RC upgrade utility refered to in the Deployment Guide. Use this if you want to upgrade your VMM 2008 R2 Beta deployment to the Release Candidate.

Microsoft Lab Extreme 2009

Lab Extreme

IT Pros has been doing Hands-On-Labs. In spirit of community sharing and to let you experience how is it like to create Hands-On-Lab, you will CREATE Hands-On-Labs. We will put your names as creator of the contents. Push yourself in 8 hours, to learn about the technology you will write on, put them into instructional labs, and test the concepts.

Intended Audience

IT Pros who are can endure the stress, learn and has the willingness to share and stand out.

Photos
http://cid-457ba7c60060614f.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Lab%20Extreme%20%7C5CTU%202009%7C6

Creating a Hyper-v R2 Lab

The plan

My goal was to build a home lab to test out some of the new cool features in Hyper-v 2.0 such as Live Migration and Processor Compatability mode.

To do this I created a shared storage environment and a 2 node failover cluster with different processors (Same family AMD).

The kit:
Hp desktop pc vista(This will host the Shared Storage server)
Custom Built machine (Node 1) AMD-V support
Hp dv9000 laptop (Node 2) AMD-V support



The story so far

Shared Storage

I Downloaded and installed Starwind on my vista laptop. The reason im using Starwind as my ISCSI target rather than something like openfiler or FreeNas is that Starting with Windows 2008, the cluster software requires your iSCSI target software to support something called "persistent reseration commands". These are based on the SCSI Primary commands-3 specs (SPC-3), and most open source software (with the possible exception of OpenSolaris) is based on SCSI-2, and does not support these reservation commands.

Note once installed create a firewall rule to allow tcp port 3260. I created 2 iscsi targets located on a usb attached external 1 terabyte disk. Needless to say this is for lab purposes only.

On Nodes 1 and 2 I installed Windows 2008 R2 enterprise eddition.

For the low down details have a look at my lab step by step.

The Lab

http://sites.google.com/site/alexcrawford/Home/Hyper-VLab1InstallingHyper-V2NodeCluster.pdf?

Dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 from a VHD

Creating Native Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) in Windows 7 -

This can be done with diskpart but on Windows 7 do it the easy way.

Right Click on My Computer and Click 'Manage' that will open up Computer Management, in that click on Disk Management.

Right Click on Disk Management and select 'Create VHD' This will open new windows 'Create and Attach Virtual Hard Disk'

In this windows select the location where you want to create the VHD file. Make sure you have sufficient free space while creating new VHD file. After that provide the Virtual Hard Disk size and format of the VHD.
By default the Fixed size is recommended but you can select Dynamic expanding if you don't want to allocate the disk space. There would be slight performance difference between fixed size and dynamically expanding.
For production environment it is suggested to go for Fixed size. For the demo purpose we will go ahead with dynamically expanding VHD format.

Click on OK and that will install newly attached (mounted) VHD. Now next step will be initializing the disk

Alright now Right Click on Disk 1 (Blue icon) and click on 'Initialize' This will open a new window 'Initialize Disk.'
Select the partition and click on 'OK.' You can leave the current selection to default.

As you can see now the status of the Disk 1 is changed to 'Online.' We create a new simple volume on the Disk 1

So Right Click on the 'Unallocated' area and select 'New Simple Volume' This will launch 'New Simple Volume Wizard.'
After that click on next and specify size, we will keep the default NTFS File System and select the complete size i.e. 20 GB and click on 'Next' to specify drive letter. I will select Drive Letter 'X:' and click on 'Next'
On the next page we will select Label for the drive (in this case 'Windows7') and click on 'Next.' Now, we will get the brief summary of the choices we selected. Click on 'Finish' to continue.

Booting a Windows 7 VHD or Windows Server 7 (aka Windows Server 2008 R2) VHD

To complete this section you will need a copy of Imagex this is a part of the Windows 7 WAIK You can download the WAIK for Windows 7 from here (This is in beta at time of writing so link may change)

From you windows 7 box mount your Windows 2008 R2 cd to a drive for the purpose of this article we will use the d:

From the path you installed imagex run the following command

imagex /apply d:\sources\install.wim 3 x:\ (x: is the mounted vhd you created earlier)

This will then apply the install.wim for Windows 2008 R2 enterprise edition to you mounted vhd

Adding the VHD Entry in Boot Menu and then Boot from VHD

Now that we have successfully created VHD files. The last step is adding boot entry for the VHD file in your Windows 7 or Windows Server 7 using BCDEdit.exe tool.

For this step open the Elevated Command Prompt with Administrator Privileges and type the following commands.
C:\>bcdedit /copy {current} /d "My New VHD Description"
Note: This will Return the GUID of the Loader Object that you will use to replace below

C:\>bcdedit /set device vhd=[driveletter:]\\

C:\>bcdedit /set osdevice vhd=[driverletter:]\\
C:\>bcdedit /set detecthal on

Run C:\>bcdedit /v to view your new config

If you want to delete any existing VHD entry from the Boot Menu you can always use the command C:\>bcdedit /delete /cleanup

Now detach you vhd from disk manager and your good to go.