Alberto Ortega’s Blog

Grabá un Screencast de 5 minutos para TechNET y participa!

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Windows 7 RC has a little bug regarding Image capturing, it is not big deal but you might have an interrupted sysprep process if you don’t take this into consideration. This is reported and will be fixed on the RTM build, for now you can follow this guide to succesfully get a .WIM image from a Windows 7 RC model machine:

1. Open a command prompt as Administrator.
2. Navigate to c:\windows\system32\sysprep
3. (bug in RC) Make sure the “wmpnetwk.exe” process is not running and the “Windows Media Player Networking Sharing” service is disabled. If not a problem related to the drmv2clt.dll (Digital Rights Management DLL) will abort the sysprep execution.
4. Run sysprep.exe /oobe /generalize /reboot

Now begins the capture process:

1. (~5 mins) Sysprep will go though the foillowing phase
   1. Processing cleanup phase Sysprep plugins
   2. Processing generalize phase Sysprep plugins
2. (~5 mins) Reboot (be aware of this reboot to capture the image, if not you will need to re-run Sysprep)
   1. Press F12 (or manually configure the BIOS to boot from the LAN)
   2. Press F12 again to initiate a session the PXE Server.
   3. Select the Image Capture option as you will be generating a .WIM file for later upload to the MDT Server
   4. Once in the image capture wizard
      1. Choose a name for your image
      2. Capture locally to avoid networking issues and maker sure you will get the .WIM image
      3. Choose a name for the file on the local disk and make sure you specify a .WIM extension for the file
3. (~70 mins) Be patience go somewhere else while the .WIM generation tooks place.
4. (~10 mins) First boot: Now boot again the model workstation and you will get a 1st boot experience.

Resources

1. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproinstall/thread/8f5002e1-95b4-47bf-b031-4b72b3eb388a
2. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproinstall/thread/c469805c-98af-4bb2-9655-c86c294470a9
3. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744330(WS.10).aspx

I am preparing a couple of Screencast for TechNET LATAM as part of a huge initiative of 49 Screencasts that will be launched the next month. So, I took the time to dive into some new cool Windows 7 features, this time I will share my experience with Branch Cache.

Branch Cache is a cool new feature on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and is now available so early adopters can take advantage of this feature right from the RC build of Windos 7 (Build 7100). The goal is to cache on branch offices workstations content downloaded from the main office to optimize the WAN link load of the branch office were it is not common to rely on high-speed links.

Highlights

• Were straight forward to deploy via GPO.
• Supported protocols are HTTP, HTTPs, streaming and SMB (Web and File server role on Windows 2008 can be configured).
• It is aimed to Intranet traffic only, for example: Documents on a file server, training videos, images in an intranet site.Works with Robocopy and standard copy, it is pretty firewall.

Branch cache supports 2 scenarios for distributed or centralized cache according to the branch office size and networks topology.

• Distributed scenario
  • The branch client access the main office to download the content, first it gets the ID of the content (which is a hash of the content itself), then it leverages WS-Discovery to broadcast a query to every other client in the branch to see if someone else has downloaded the content, if not, the 1st download begins
  • The 2nd client who needs this data from the main office will get again the hash (if the content has changed this hash will be different - in this case lets suppose it has not changed), so, with the has it uses again WS-discovery and finds that another client has already downloaded the content so the content will travel only though the branch office this time.
    
    Pasted from <http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd755969(WS.10).aspx>

• Hosted scenario (Centralized cache)
  • Is quite the same with the difference that a dedicated branch cache server exists and every client instead of using WS-Discovery will directly search on this branch cache server, if the hash is not found the content is downloaded from the main office.
  • Then the client advertises the content to the branch cache server, so the server can get the content that might be polled from a 2nd client.
    Pasted from <http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd755969(WS.10).aspx>

Distributed cache mode is aimed to less than 50 workstation branch offices as it has can only retrieve cached content from a single subnet. Also take into consideration that hibernated or sleeped laptops cannot server cached content to other clients.

Want to go deeper, check the following links:

Resources:

• Devrim Iyigun giving an executive overview of Branch Cache: http://edge.technet.com/Media/Branch-Cache-in-Windows-7/
• Branch Cache Technical Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd755969(WS.10).aspx
• Branch Cache Early Adopters Guide: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd637762.aspx
• Server Configuration: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd637785(WS.10).aspx
• Client configuration: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd637820(WS.10).aspx

I would like to share a couple of highlights about Windows 7 Printers & Drivers that I were useful for me from an ITPro point of view

1) Set different printers for different locations with Windows7

This let me configure the a PDF writer when my laptop is not connected to any network. Using this feature you have an smart profile about your printing environment, on your home or your secondary office you will never said again “That is not the #”!#!”# printer I want!!”

To do this

1. Start Menu > Device and Printers
2. Select any printer and click on Manage Default Printers.
   
3. Then, for the network No Network select your PDF printer.
   

1) Printer Driver Isolation on Windows 7

How many times did your print spooler crashed? Changes are that many, spooler crashes, the computer gets unresponsive, you cannot send more work to the spool until you restart the spooler and so on. This days of headache of printer drivers finished winth Windows 7. In Windows 2000, the print spooler was moved to be executed on user mode and this was a huge step forward printer drivers stability, complaints from windows users in the world were not ignored on that era and a design decision changed the paradigm.

In Windows 7 the isolation goes further as the OS allows to isolate on different user space processes the printer drivers. So, drivers that are not so reliable can work isolated without interfering on others printers work. This is potentially useful for print server but also applies to workstation as every end-user has the capability to isolate the printer spooler process that run on his own VM. The logical consequence is to isolate printer drivers from each other and/or the spooler. Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 achieve that by executing printer driver code not from within spoolsv.exe, but from a dedicated process, PrintIsolationHost.exe. In case of a driver causing a crash, only one instance of PrintIsolationHost.exe goes away, but the spooler service itself is left unperturbed.

A layered control of Isolation behavior was injected for IT Pros, you can manage isolation

• via GPOs
• via Driver .INF file
• from the PMC (Printer Management Console)

I will show you the simplest scenario of  configuring on a workstation using the PMC, and let you go further if you need it, to do this:

1. Open the Print Management MMC
2. Go to drivers
3. Right click on a driver and select the isolation mode you need for that driver.
   

Reference
Printer Installation and Driver Management, slide deck from WinHEC 2008 by Shawn Maloney