Windows Image sizes continue to get bigger and bigger. I recently recreated my WIMs that I use for testing and applied all important updates through March of 2015 before taking the capture (using MDT of course). For Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit), I started with the latest available Windows 7 Enterprise with SP1 ISOs. …
In System Center Configuration Manager Operating System Deployment, content can be obtained in one of two ways for network deployments. The first way is to configure the Task Sequence Deployment to “Download all content locally before starting task sequence”. There are a few downsides to this option – it is only available to ConfigMgr clients…
I am really honored to have been a speaker at the first ever Midwest Management Summit (aka the new MMS), that took place November 10th – 12th in Minnesota. This event was the who’s who of systems management and did not disappoint. There were over 100 sessions delivered in three days by 50+ experts (which included 32 Microsoft…
Recently, I was curious to see if I could get 1E PXE Everywhere (included with 1E Nomad) to boot a MDT Lite Touch boot image. Since PXE Everywhere integrates with System Center Configuration Manager, it automatically creates the necessary BCD files based on the ConfigMgr boot images. So that left me with using the command line…
Last month I had the honor of speaking at my first ever IT/Dev Connections in sunny Las Vegas. I had the pleasure of presenting on Building the Ultimate Operating System Task Sequence with my coworker and good friend Troy Martin. As promised, we have completed publishing a series of blogs on all the topics in…
I was doing an OSD project about 5 years ago when I came up with the idea of automatically opening the smsts.log file using Trace32 (now replaced by CMTrace). I am always up for a challenge to see if something can be done, so I set out to see if I could make it happen. …
Back in the ConfigMgr 2007 days, I wrote a similar blog called ConfigMgr OSD: Always including certain files in your Boot Images -think Trace32. I figured it was time to create a similar one for ConfigMgr 2012 since some things have changed. Even though CMTrace is now included in the boot image by default, there…
System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager does a great job of deploying Windows operating systems. We (1E) have been able to hit some pretty high success rates in helping our customers with their Windows migrations. However, if not done correctly, OSD can be very dangerous and can cripple your environment in a short amount of…
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