Archive for May, 2010|Monthly archive page
Meeting Jeff Wettlaufer
Comments (1)The crushing disappointment of not making it to MMS this year (due to plate tectonics) was soothed slightly last week by the Best of MMS UK event held at Microsoft’s London offices in Cardinal Place. As well as a chance to see some of the content delivered at MMS (including plenty of demos using Configuration Manager v.Next and Virtual Machine Manager v.Next) it was also a good opportunity to meet up with some former colleagues and some new associates and to swap stories over a beer or two.
It was also a chance to catch up with Jeff Wettlaufer, a Senior Technical Product Manager in the Microsoft System Center division. Jeff’s always interested on the view from the trenches and was kind enough to interview me and Carl from Orinoko about our recent experiences with Windows 7 and System Center. Whether the interview ever sees the light of day, who knows… we’re not exactly well rehearsed in these things so are mainly tongue-tied for the whole thing, but it really did happen:
Jeff, Carl and John, Cardinal Place, 18th May 2010
Adding Server Core Roles in the Task Sequence
We are deploying Hyper-V Server to Dell M610 blades using Configuration Manager OSD. Deploying servers, as opposed to workstations, has some different challenges, though much is the same. In particular it’s critical to manage the drivers as tightly as you would with a workstation deployment. We’ve suffered a few BSOD’s from having out of date drivers…
When deploying the OS we want to add some roles for clustering, DotNet, Powershell, etc. It turns out that the MDT Add Roles task isn’t particularly aware of Server Core or Hyper-V Server, so the DotNet and PowerShell commands don’t work. This isn’t a big deal, as we can just use DISM commands. So,to install DotNet 2, we execute:
DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFx2-ServerCore
NB This is case sensitive. It is also critical to disable 64-bit file system redirection, if you don’t, the 32-bit Configuration Manager agent will execute DISM from SYSWOW64 and you will receive an error in the Task Sequence status messages “The operating system reported error code 11: An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format”
