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With the release of Windows Server 2012, I wanted to upgrade my test and demo environment as quickly as possible. As with many hosting offerings, I do not have physical access to my dedicated server but do get two hours of remote console access for free. Therefore, I needed a way to deploy Windows Server 2012. This article documents how I successfully installed Windows Server 2012 on the second hard disk from a running Windows Server 2008 R2.

In a centralized environment such as a XenApp farm, users share resources with one another. A thoroughly designed platform will be able to handle all prospected users as well as provide contingencies for failures and maintenance tasks. When sizing a XenApp farm, resources as well as licenses need to be calculated for the concurrently connected users (CCU) which may well be only a small fraction of the total number of users. From an architectural point of view,

Windows Recovery Environment (RE) is based on the Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) and can be extended to be a minimalistic system to recover a somehow broken systen. Windows RE is configured in the boot configuration data to be the failover system for the primary boot entry. If the boot loader fails on the default entry, it will automatically try to boot into the recovery environment.

Windows RE offers the following features:

•  System Repair attempts to correct typical issues rendering the system unbootable,

The most prominent reason for thinking about booting through UEFI instead of BIOS is the availability of large drives. BIOS requires a MBR (Master Boot Record) formatted drive which is inherently limited to 2 TiB. But there are more very good reasons for making the switch. In this article I will provide a brief comparison of BIOS and UEFI before explaining how to create bootable devices for UEFI and install Windows on an UEFI system.

Just wanted to keep you up-to-date regarding my task to automatically build a folder-collection structure in a customer’s Configuration Manager 2012 environment. (see also article https://www.sepago.de/e/david/2012/02/24/create-folders-in-microsoft-system-center-configuration-manager-with-powershell )

Create Configuration Manager device collections

We already know how to create folders underneath the collections node. Now we need to create the collections our clients will one day be members of.
This isn’t too hard a task, so here’s my script:

You all know that we’ve got “Limiting collections” now in Configuration Manager 2012,

Just a short article today…

I’m in the middle of a Configuration Manager implementation at a customer’s site and facing the problem of creating lots of folders and collections in those folders.

As you all might know Microsoft got rid of the “subcollections” and gave us collection folders to arrange our collections.

My customer needs round about 150 folders and I am a lazy admin. What does a lazy admin do?

A lot of things changed with the coming of ConfigMgr2012 (for now it’s in the state of RC1). Loads of people already wrote articles about what cool new features and goodies came with ConfigMgr2012, I instead want to have a closer look on troubleshooting, as I am in the middle of a RC1 deployment at a customer’s site.

Log Files

If you’ve already worked with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007,

Die Migration servergespeicherter Profile ist – wie schon von der Version 1.1 des Profile Migrator gewohnt – in drei einfachen Schritten realisierbar.

Als Erstes wählen wir die zu migrierenden Quellprofile aus. Das kann über Organisationseinheiten des Active Dirctory, über Verzeichnisse, über Netzwerkfreigaben oder durch die manuelle Eingabe des Pfades geschehen

Jetzt kann die Basis der neuen Profile wahlweise über ein Musterprofil ermittelt werden, oder durch die Angabe das Pfades zu einem Default Profile.

Wie oft hat man mit SCCM 2007 versucht ein OS per PXE zu installieren und der Wizard hat einfach neugestartet!? 😉

Die häufigsten Gründe sind folgende:

• Der User für den Netzwerkzugriff hat keine Berechtigung auf dem Share oder wurde nicht angelegt.
• Die Pakete liegen nicht auf dem Share.
• Der Hashwert der Pakete im Share stimmt nicht mit dem Hashwert in der DB überein.

Every so often I am asked to help analyze weird issues when assigning group memberships or permissions – accounts are not found and the Event Log shows unsettling messages. Many of these situations can be traced back to the operating system using a different machine account password than the domain is aware of.

Yes, Machine Accounts Have Passwords!

Just like user accounts, a machine object in Active Directory has a password to identify the machine and to protect the machine account.