Unity Migration Blog

Microsoft Virtual PC can be used to easily install and test ITD's new environment and installation methods without having to sacrifice any hardware.

Disclaimer: This is not any sort of announcement that people outside of ITD should test the new environment.

What you need:
Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (Download)
ITD's Pilot Installation CD ISO (Download)

Configure Virtual PC
Install Virtual PC and create a new virtual machine. Configure the virtual machine to use at least 10 GB of hard drive space and at least 512 MB of memory. (Yes, these numbers are arbitrary)

Important: You need to select your wired network adapter under the virtual machine's networking settings. A wireless card, Shared Networking (NAT), and "Local only" probably won't work.

Virtual PC assigns a different MAC address to each virtual machine and these MAC addresses are not the same as the one your host PC is using. You need to register the virtual machine's MAC address in QIP and configure it to use M-DHCP.

If you already have another virtual machine that is using a MAC address registered in QIP, you can force the new virtual machine to use the same MAC address so you don't have to register another one.

Open the following file to view or modify the MAC address that the virtual machine will use:
My Documents\My Virtual Machines\*VM NAME*\*VM NAME*.vmc

You should see a line like this:
[ethernet_card_address] type="bytes"0003FF0E9EC2/[ethernet_card_address]

Note: greater than and less than signs were replaced with brackets in the line above because the blog software gets confused.

This line can be edited to use a MAC address that has already been registered in QIP to use DHCP from another one of your virtual machines. If you haven't already registered an address, use the MAC address from this line when configuring QIP.

Boot to the Installation ISO Image
From the CD menu in Virtual PC, select "Capture ISO Image" and then select the location of the pilot-install.iso file that you downloaded. Start the virtual machine and it should boot to the ISO file and Windows PE should start up. You should not have to do anything after this point thanks to Microsoft's "Zero Touch Installation" magic. The operating system should install, add the appropriate drivers, add the virtual machine to the domain, and eventually you should see the Windows XP logon box.

Tip: When Windows PE boots up, press F8 when you see "Initializing Windows PE".

This will cause a command box to appear. This is useful if you have any trouble. The most likely problem will be if networking isn't working. You can run ipconfig /all to make sure the virtual machine successfully receives the IP address you registered.

I've been trying to get some experience deploying applications through SMS. First thing I decided to take a crack at was some of the applications used in the Help Desk since they will need these apps if they participate in the pilot. There are three apps that I think are critical to the Help Desk: ACD Agent, PHP Live! Support, and Remedy.

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I have installed the SMS 2003 R2 components on SMS00. The components are:

• Inventory Tool for Custom Updates
• Custom Updates Publishing Tool
• Scan Tool for Vulnerability Assessment
• Device Management Feature Pack

The installation created a few new application packages:

• Custom Updates Tool
• MBSA 2.0
• Vulnerability Assessment Tool

The installation also created some new collections. These collections only include my workstation (URLACHER, Go Bears!).

I haven't tried out any of these new features yet but they look pretty cool.

The OS Deployment Feature Pack is also an updated component of R2. The CD contained a link to install it, but all that did was bring me to the OSD web page. Patrick had planned to install it so I didn't proceed.

SMS packages were created for Firefox and Thunderbird, both version 1.5.0.7.

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An SMS application package was created for Office 2003. It was successfully deployed to a test workstation.

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This post describes how to configure your workstation to use the SMS Administrator Console to connect to a remote site server.

It finally works... $%#@!@# Novell Client!

Can somebody please try this on your workstation and report the results back to the blog in the next day or 2? Thanks.

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