Here is a step-by-step quick guide on building the perfect Windows 10 v1809 reference image using MDT 8450, Windows ADK 10 v1809, and WinPE Addon for Windows ADK 10 v1809. If you are looking for a Windows 7 version of this guide, check this post: https://deploymentresearch.com/521/Back-to-Basics-Building-a-Windows-7-SP1-Reference-Image-using-MDT-2013-Update-2
Starting with Windows ADK 10 v1809, WinPE is now a separate install (Addon) to Windows ADK 10. As with previous Windows ADK 10 releases you find the setup files on the Microsoft Hardware Dev Center: http://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/get-started/adk-install
Wow, last week at Microsoft Ignite 2018 was pretty intense to say the least. Six days (including pre-day) with 1000+ sessions available. Below you find a listing of the shiniest Windows 10 Deployment session from Microsoft Ignite 2018:
LEDBAT, or Windows LEDBAT as the Microsoft implementation of it is called, is yet another option to reduce the impact Windows 10, and other software distribution, will have on your network. This feature is currently available on Windows Server, version 1709 or later, and requires Windows 10 v1607 or later on the client side. Hopefully the feature will be backported to Windows Server 2016 too (it’s technically already there, but disabled, and in the need of a bug fix).
Starting with Windows 10 v1607, OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo etc. are required to support TPM 2.0 for new machines certified for Windows 10. Exceptions apply for special purpose commercial systems, as well as custom orders, or machines delivered with a custom image from the customer, but anyway.
When doing Windows 10 Servicing, meaning going from one Windows 10 version to the next, it makes absolute sense to do that upgrade using an already updated image. In this post you find a script that does exactly that. This image can obviously also be used for the image you use if upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (for the few orgs that does).
Here is a quick guide on setting up Delivery Optimization (DO) for a ConfigMgr environment.
Here is a guide on how to add Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) to a ConfigMgr boot image so it starts first in the boot process, making it possible to remote into WinPE as soon as the boot image has loaded, even before the PXE password and ConfigMgr prestart commands.
This is a quick follow-up to my Beyond ZIP Part II – Data DeDuplication Archives for all Windows versions via ZPAQ post, showing some new benchmarking info.
Every know and then the discussion about using offline servicing vs. build and capture for your reference images comes up, so I figured it was about time to write a post about it.
This is a guest post graciously provided by Adam Gross (@AdamGrossTX). Thanks Adam!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last week, you have learned that the version of the Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser components can be the difference of your WSUS/SUP being hammered with network traffic or not. Luckily, it’s very easy to check.
This week started pretty harsh, a ton of customers reaching out to our team having WSUS issues. Everything from the “traditional” CPU and Memory spikes, to severe network traffic over port 8530 to the WSUS/SUP server. Basically Clients downloading massive amount of info, some customers reporting up to 700 MB per endpoint.
In the Endpoint Zone with Brad Anderson [1801] video, Brad Andersson (@Anderson) and http://twitter.com/simonster shared some interesting data points from 2017 about Windows 10, ConfigMgr and some other things. Here is a subset:
In this post you learn how to run MDT Task sequences, for either Computer refresh or Inplace-upgrades, from Microsoft Intune. Using task sequences gives you much better control of the Windows 10 servicing compared to regular features updates. And, as you probably figured out from the title already, there are more posts coming…:)
So its that time of year again where it is time to create all those Maintenance Windows for your patch groups. If you are like me and don’t want to do them on actual patch Tuesday (not that Microsoft ever had any issues with their patches, right? ) you might miss an option in ConfigMgr to create the MW’s with an offset based on patch Tuesday. The reason you might want this is that sometimes the second Wednesday comes before the second Tuesday of the month.
I recently (well yesterday) stumbled across a ConfigMgr Current Branch setup of a new site server failing due to TLS configuration. Turned out that the ConfigMgr 1702 setup (latest baseline as of today) couldn’t install when TLS 1.0 and SSL 3.0 had been removed due to server hardening. The server was Windows Server 2016, and the database SQL was SQL Server 2016 Standard with SP1.
In this post you learn to upgrade an existing MDT 8443 environment, with or without ConfigMgr integration, to MDT 8450. The guide is divided in two parts:
Back in ConfigMgr Technical Preview 1706, Microsoft introduced IPv6 PXE, a feature you could enable not only on distribution points running on Windows Server OS, but also on Windows Client OS. Effectively having a Windows client configured as a DP also acting as a PXE server. Microsoft MVP Ronni Pedersen (@ronnipedersen), have a blog post on that:
ConfigMgr 1710 has even more PowerShell cmdlets for creating and editing task sequences compared to ConfigMgr 1706.