Has it really been 6 months?

By sduncan | Published: May 4, 2010

I am currently blogging about my Windows 7 Deployment experience. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It’s hard to believe that it has been 6 months since I last posted here!

At the risk of over-doing the Data#3 deployment success story –I will only make one comment: and that is to say that in the past six months, the number of times a Windows 7 SOE or deployment issue has been escalated to me has been so insignificant I often wonder if anyone at Data#3 is actually using it! But of course, there are 500+ instances of the Windows 7 SOE in production, and the SCCM 2007 infrastructure is delivering new images, applications and collecting asset inventory information from both intranet and internet based clients on a daily basis. The deployment has proven itself to be robust, as well as valuable.

Speaking of value – recently Scott Gosling (National Practice Manager – Microsoft Solutions) and Steve Bolland (National Manager – PMO) have been taking Data#3’s “7 months later” story on the road, giving our customers an update on the value that has been recognised through our deployment since the project wrapped up.

Meanwhile, we’ve been busily delivering Windows 7 for our customers all over Australia. I’m currently deploying SCCM 2007 for a customer with 15,000 seats – a primary driver being to enable them for a full scale Windows 7 deployment in the coming months.

It seems everyone has Windows 7 on their radar for deployment in the short to mid-term. I just hope everyone gives their deployment all the planning and respect it deserves! With the right approach, it’ll be the most rewarding thing you do this year…we don’t need to talk about what happens when you get it wrong ;-)

Happy Deploying :)

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A Couple of Actions from the Data#3 + Windows 7 Roadshow

By sduncan | Published: October 13, 2009

So our deployment is well and truly complete, and the response from our users has been fantastic. For the last two weeks we’ve taken our story on the road, presenting to somewhere near 500 customers at sessions hosted in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Attendance at the events was outstanding, and the feedback forms suggest our content was very well received! A huge thank you to everyone who attended; I trust there was something that all of you were able to take away that was of value.

There were a couple of things that I promised I’d post. One was a link to a tool called Securable, a handy tool that can be used to check whether or not your device is 64 bit capable, if it supports Hardware D.E.P, and if it supports Hardware Virtualisation. You can find and download the tool from http://www.grc.com

The other thing I promised to post was a link to a whitepaper describing considerations and strategies for accommodating roaming profiles and folder redirection. The whitepaper discusses XP -> Vista migrations, but you can be confident that the considerations will be very similar if not the same. You can download the whitepaper here.

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Week 2 of Production Deployment

By sduncan | Published: September 2, 2009

We are in week 2 of deployment, and shortly we’ll have deployed the Windows 7 SOE to around half of the fleet. We’ll ramp it up again next week and should hit our target date for deployment by 09/09/09. We have been averaging about 30 machines per day fairly comfortably, with a 3 days on 2 days off approach to the deployment schedule. By that, I mean we are deploying heavily Monday  – Wednesday. Thursday we tidy up and address issues that have been raised during the week; and Friday we get all our ducks in a row ready to hit the ground running at 8am the following Monday.

For me, Thursday and Friday are the most important days. Learning from our experiences during the week and putting measures in place to improve the speed and accuracy of the deployment for the following week, ensures that we are constantly improving our process.

Speaking of lessons learned, have I mentioned yet just how much I hate PST files?! USMT 4.0 does a fine job of finding PST files during state capture, restoring them and ensuring they are appropriately re-connected in the users Outlook profile. We encountered an issue this week where a portion of a PST was locked by a process, and USMT didn’t capture it. Outlook had been shutdown properly. Imagine what would have happened if there wasn’t a backup of that PST? Users are understandably passionate about their mail archives!

To make sure the SCCM task sequence doesn’t continue if such an error is encountered – either use a config.xml file with the <ErrorControl> Section properly configured, or include a script in the task sequence to interrogate scanstate.log and bail out if the error is found.

But if you want to be really, really sure about safely maintaining users’ mail archives – get rid of PSTs altogether and implement an Enterprise email archiving solution. Data#3 will be doing exactly that very soon.

Lesson Learned.

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Open Pilot: Windows 7 Enterprise RTM SOE Unleashed

By sduncan | Published: August 13, 2009

After waiting a little longer than we expected for the RTM media, we are now officially 2 days in to Open Pilot. In the past 2 days, we have deployed our Windows 7 Enterprise RTM SOE to 31 Open Pilot users spread across 7 geographical locations and 4 time zones. We have deployed to 7 different hardware platforms including desktops, laptops, tablet PCs and netbooks – with a combination of 32 and 64 bit hardware.  We have deployed to a sample of every business unit with a combination of experienced and not so experienced users. All this with just 2 images; one 32 bit image and one 64 bit.

The results so far have been fantastic. Other than a handful of teething problems, the deployment process was essentially pain free for the users. With a bit of planning, we were able to automate the capture and restoration of user state, the reinstallation of key Tier 2 applications, and the setting of appropriate regional and time zone information. We achieved this using SCCM 2007. We created dynamically populated collections of machines with variables assigned; that were in turn used in a Task Sequence to deploy the SOE image along with all of the conditional Tier 2 components and customisations.

We have one day left of Open Pilot deployment, with another 12 machines targeted for tomorrow. Next week we’ll spend a couple of days regrouping before unleashing Windows 7 on the remainder of the organisation.

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Windows 7 Is Now RTM

By sduncan | Published: July 23, 2009

Windows 7 went RTM this morning:  http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

Let’s see how long it takes to get my hands on the source!

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The Calm Before the Storm

By sduncan | Published: July 23, 2009

RTM is imminent, and I’d say I’m just about ready for Open Pilot and full scale deployment. The issues that we identified during Closed Pilot are now down to a manageable list and I’m feeling pretty excited about pulling the trigger.

The issues we identified during closed pilot were fairly trivial; none of which came close to being a showstopper for a move to the new OS. We tidied up the Location fields in AD sites and subnets, and the location fields on each of the published printers so that we could easily provide users with a way to re-connect their own printers once we deploy the new SOE. We changed the way some apps start at first logon, made basic config changes to some OS components and included driver support for a handful of new hardware types that have come out of the woodwork.

I also spent some time planning collections and task sequence variables, so that we could dynamically configure the right region-specific options when we start deploying. I know I said I wasn’t going to use MDT integration with SCCM – and I still haven’t – but I did pinch a few scripts from MDT to make my life a little easier…this post from Michael Petersen was super handy for making good use of Task Sequence variables for customising entries in unattend.xml on the fly: http://blog.coretech.dk/osdeploy/working-with-regional-settings-during-osd/

I’m currently moving all of our SCCM packages from the staging environment in to production, and getting the source pushed around the country to all the distribution points. Bring on RTM!

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Windows 7 SOE Deployed to Closed Pilot Users

By sduncan | Published: July 14, 2009

Last week we rolled out the first cut of our Windows 7 SOE image to a set of closed pilot users. There are 27 closed pilot users in total, representing a good cross section of users and hardware types from each line of business. Nearly all the closed pilot users are located in the same location – predominantly to keep them close at hand in case I need to give them any extra attention throughout the pilot.

The closed pilot image consists of the RC build (7100) of Windows 7, and 21 Tier 1 applications, including Office 2007 Enterprise, Office Communicator, Live Meeting client and the conferencing add-in for Outlook, Forefront Client Security and all the usual readers and players that are typically required.

Closed Pilot is as much about proving the deployment process, as it is about getting valuable feedback and acceptance from the users. Feedback regarding the deployment process has been extremely encouraging. The process essentially involved deploying the SCCM 2007 client to the target workstations and advertising a Task Sequence to a collection containing those workstations.

For each user, depending on the amount of data that need to be handled, the process took about an hour. In that time, the Task Sequence captured the user’s state, laid down the SOE image, deployed role specific Tier 2 applications, installed hardware specific utilities and drivers that couldn’t be included in the driver repository, and restored the user’s state. Apart from a handful of things that we missed in the build and had to configure manually (that are now on the to-do list before open pilot) – there was nothing left for the users to do other than log back in and enjoy their new OS J

Open Pilot will start sometime in the next few weeks, depending on how quickly Windows 7 RTM code becomes available to us. Then the fun really starts…

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User State Migration Tool (USMT) 4.0

By sduncan | Published: July 3, 2009

Arguably the most challenging task of an SOE deployment is determining how to capture users’ data and application settings, and then restore it post image deployment. The speed and accuracy of this task has possibly the biggest impact on a user’s perceived success (or otherwise) of the project. Windows 7 may be a wonderful operating system; but for users – that will count for nothing if they lose a bunch of important mail from a locally stored pst file, or lose the photos of their last family holiday.

To mitigate this risk, I’ve seen cases where every machine had an image taken and stored in a cupboard prior to reimaging.  Overkill? Maybe…

In our case we’ll be using USMT 4.0. There are plenty of new features, but my favourite is the Hard-Link migration store. Typically when running USMT, we would either choose to store the captured state on a network location, or in a protected area on the local disk. With hard-link migration, captured files are stored locally, but are not actually copied from their original location. Instead, a directory of hard-links to the data is created in a protected folder on the disk. The links are then re-mapped to the new locations once the new image has been deployed. Because there is no need to move data around on the disk, the time taken to capture and then restore user state is significantly reduced.

In this case, I’m using an SCCM 2007 SP2 Task Sequence to capture state, deploy the SOE image and restore the state.

Using the local storage with hard-link option, we’re not actually re-partitioning or formatting the drive…instead the drive is “wiped”, leaving the protected folders behind. I’ve found that in a small number of cases the “wipe” process has failed to delete some data, resulting in the Task Sequence failing when attempting to apply the image. Fortunately, while still in PE, the captured user state can be manually copied to a network location, and restored later using the loadstate command line after re-applying the image.

 

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Qualcomm WWAN Device on Windows 7

By sduncan | Published: June 22, 2009

HP Elitebook 6930p and 2530p notebooks are standard models that are purchased when a Data#3 user orders a new notebook. Generally speaking we had very little trouble sorting out drivers to support Windows 7 on these devices; until it came to the onboard Qualcomm Wireless WAN device.  What a nightmare.

Luckily for us, we aren’t the first to come across this challenge.

It should have been as simple as:

1.       Install the HP Wireless Assistant

2.       Install the HP Multi WWAN Driver

3.       Install the HP Connection Manager

I found two blogs that helped me get this over the line: The Mobile Broadband Team Blog and Josh Perry’s post about Qualcomm Gobi WWAN Card on Windows 7.

To get it to work, I automated the following steps and included them as conditional items in an SCCM 2007 task sequence:

1.       Install the HP Wireless Assistant Version 3.00 K2

2.       Extract the HP Multi WWAN Driver package

a.       Replace DIFxAPI.Dll in the driver package, with the version from Windows\System32 on a Windows 7 Machine (see Josh Perry’s post)

b.      Install HP Wireless Broadband Modules

c.       Install Qualcomm Gobi Driver Package for HP

d.      Install Qualcomm Gobi Images for HP

3.       Install Vodafone Mobile Connect 8.03.0017.0

The reason we had to use Vodafone Mobile Connect instead of HP Connection Manager – is that I couldn’t get the HP Connection Manager to connect to the Internet. HP Connection Manager 2.0 successfully connected to the Vodafone service – I could send an SMS message; but could NOT connect to the Internet. I got this error message in the log when I tried:

ERROR.: HPCM [Exception] function
_THPWMServices_RequiresActivation, err= The system cannot find the path specified. /x0d/x0a

ERROR.: HPCM [Exception] function
_THPWMServices_RunActivation, err= The system cannot find the path specified. /x0d/x0a

These steps, with the Vodafone client, worked fine on the x86 Windows 7 Build. For the x64 version of the build, the workaround using Josh’s Gobiloader tool was required, and worked nicely – but not nice enough to deploy to typical users. Until HP/Qualcomm release a driver package that supports Windows 7, the 6930p and 2530p closed pilot users will have the x86 version of the SOE deployed with Vodafone Connection Manager.

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SCCM 2007 for Data#3 (the customer)…

By sduncan | Published: June 9, 2009

System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 is always my tool of choice for creating and deploying Windows SOEs. I’ll discuss the reasons for that in another post at another time, but for now my problem is that Data#3 (the customer) does not yet have SCCM 2007 deployed internally. Now is the perfect opportunity to do something about that.

Data#3 (the partner) is a member of the “Services Ready for Microsoft Partners” Program. As part of that program Data#3 is able to deliver pre-defined service offerings focused on key customer scenarios. These offerings can be delivered independently or jointly with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS).  “Configuration Management Optimisation” (CMO) is an offering in that program.

So, Data#3 (the partner) and Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) are jointly delivering a CMO engagement for Data#3 (the customer). Confused?

The long and the short of it is, that it’s a great opportunity for all of us.  For Data#3 the partner, we gain valuable access to an accomplished MCS consultant. Tanya is contributing wonderful knowledge and expertise to complement the existing capabilities of the consultants in the Data#3 services team.

Data#3 the customer will benefit from an SCCM 2007 implementation that has been architected and deployed with the combined efforts of MCS and Data#3’s team of accomplished Systems Management consultants.

… and the Windows 7 deployment experience will be all the better for it.

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