Yet another late night working with a set of VMs, exported out of one standalone lab environment into another.

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When creating reference images for Windows 10 or Windows 11, Sysprep is very likely to fail if the machine has Internet access, and have enough time to start updating it's built-in applications, or install new ones as part of the consumer experience feature. This post is about preventing that from happening, and is a companion to my guides on building Windows 10 and Windows 11 reference images.

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When build lab and proof-of-concept solutions in a virtual environment it's very useful to also have a virtual router to enable multiple networks to connect, and to simulate a larger environments. For example to do lab setups like below:

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Here is a step-by-step quick guide on building the perfect Windows 10 v1703 reference image using MDT 8443.

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To have a ConfigMgr environment coexist with another PXE environment, like WDS or just a 3rd Party PXE Server, you need to make some changes to the ConfigMgr boot image.

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Written Matthew Teegarden (@TheEmptyGarden).

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A little while back I had to do a presentation about what options that are available from Microsoft to manage Windows PCs, and to summarize, there are only two (sort of): ConfigMgr or Intune (standalone), or combining ConfigMgr and Intune (the hybrid model). Anyway, when preparing the presentation I spent some time on testing the standalone Microsoft Intune solution, and quickly run into a question: Should you, or should you not, use the Intune client software ?

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In Windows 10 you have the option of creating provisioning packages to apply settings/configurations to a machine. For example upgrading a machine running Windows 10 Professional to Windows 10 Enterprise. Now, to apply a provisioning package, you can either do it automatically in WinPE via DISM.exe, or later in the running Windows operating system by double-clicking the provisioning package and walk through a quick wizard.

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Windows 10 updates, both the scheduled updates from Microsoft as well as updates of Windows 10 apps, can put a significant load on your network. At least if you compare it with what a Windows 7 client does. Add that to all you normal deployments, images, applications etc. and you’ll find yourself running down the hallway, chased by folks from the network group 🙂

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A quick update on SQL Server 2016 changes that are helpful for ConfigMgr Current Branch installations.

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Back in December, the ViaMonstra hydration kit was updated to support Server (and SQL) 2016.  You can follow the post here to set it up.  We get a lot of questions offline about customizing the kit, so here is a summary of customization.

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Default behavior for failed deployments in ConfigMgr is for the error box to stick around for 15 minutes before rebooting.  That’s plenty of time if you have nothing better to do than watch progress bars and wait for failures.  But what if you have work to do and you need the error to stick around a bit longer?

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In ConfigMgr Current Branch v1610 Microsoft added in a new feature called Peer Cache. It had previously had a few guest appearances in the Technical Preview branch, but now finally made it to the shinier branch, e.g. Current Branch. Anyway, this feature is designed to help reduce the network impact of delivering content to clients in distributed environments, and works with the package types that ConfigMgr supports (updates, legacy packages, applications, images etc.).

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A very shiny week turned into even shinier with the release of Windows ADK (10) Insider Preview v15021.

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Ugh, it happened again!

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Earlier today I was troubleshooting a deployment of Windows 10 v1607 via ConfigMgr OSD. During the “Use Toolkit” action, the task sequence failed with error 800700A1.

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Hi, here is a quick post with the slides and videos from my TechDays 2016 sessions in Sweden.

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By: Nathan Kofahl

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Here are links to all blog posts mentioned in the OS Deployment – Best of 2016 video with me an Mikael Nystrom.

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…just kidding. I see the question posted a lot in the community forums – what OS to use for a lab environment.  The main theme to the question is always the same thing – the technician wants to be able to use data deduplication. Deduplication, if you're not familiar with it, maximizes your storage space […]

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