MDT

I a previous post , I detailed how to get the Bitlocker wizard page to appear when deploying Windows 8 pro. I recently confirmed another case where the wizard does not show up. I became aware of this thread on Technet because another user linked to my previously mentioned blog post. I was able to confirm after a bit of testing, that when using the Windows 8 Enterprise evaluation media, MDT does not show the Bitlocker wizard page.

In my recent rework of my Build and Capture sequences that are used for updating my reference images, I thought it would be nice to have an email notification when the process was done. This post is to show how I did this. I did this using Powershell’s Send-MailMessage cmdlet. This provides a simple way to send a message via SMTP, and this MDT 2012u1 provides support for Powershell scripts it seemed a logical choice.

Using MDT 2012 Update 1 with ADK, I built and captured a Windows 8 Pro image to enable my institution to more easily do some testing with Windows 8. After setting up a task sequence to deploy this reference image I noticed something unexpected. When choosing the Win 8 task sequence, I was not presented with the Bitlocker wizard pane. The wizard pane was showing up fine for my Win 7 task sequences.

The Novell ZCM Adaptive Agent is an example of an application that needs to be installed at deployment time and should not be included in the reference image. In general, MDT Lite Touch handles installing applications at deployment time quite nicely. The Adaptive agent, however is an example of an install process that does not play nice with MDT. It really is a quite horrible installer. First, lets take a look at the installer and what it does.

I’ve been working with MDT 2012 in my test environment, and here are three new features that I really like. Dirty Environment Cleanup Some times a deployment fails from some reason, and you just want to restart the process of a bare metal install. In MDT 2010, the task sequence would read the logs written to the hard drive and realize that a deployment was still in progress. At this point, MDT 2010 will halt the process with an error.

So, a colleague hands me two laptops that are going to be added to our loaner pool. No problem… just add the the computer’s information into the MDT database and image them. Both machines were taking quite a long time for the wizard to come up, and when it did it was obvious that none of the values from the database were coming down. Both machines were connecting to the deployment share, and had valid IP addresses.

This is something that bugged me for a while, and I just stumbled across an answer… When you create a new “Standard Client Task Sequence” to deploy an OS, the first thing you are prompted for after choosing the template is the OS. I wanted to know how to specify a different OS for an existing task Sequence. The obvious scenario for this would be when have updated a reference image but do not want to recreate a custom task sequence.

I have had an issue where I was no longer able to update my deployment share to update my boot images. If I installed MDT on another computer and connected to the share, I could then do the update, so the problem is not with the share itself but with the computer doing the updating. I had tried uninstalling WAIK and then reinstalling it, but that did not help. I did some googling and did not come up with anything either… I was suspecting that some temp files were a problem, so I started poking around.

In MDT 2010, you can create application bundles. An application bundle is simply a list of dependencies or a list of applications to be installed. In this example, an application bundle can be used to bundle 32bit and 64bit versions of an application. Here is how to do this : We will assume that we have set up both the 32bit and 64bit version of the software. In this example I am using AVG