Tag: Windows 8

New MP: Windows 8 Client Operating System

At the initial release of Windows 8 there was no plan for releasing SCOM management pack for the client operating system but it seems a lot of customers were actually needing this MP so MSFT changed its mind and decided to develop it. Several months later you can now download this brand new MP from here. This MP covers only Windows 8. Read the documentation before importing in your environment.

Licenses, Licenses, Licenses…

Learning how products are licenses is a boring thing for most of the IT Professionals but are often facing situation where we need to advise a customer about licensing. If you want to learn more about licensing Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and MS Private cloud there are 3 videos available on demand:

Upgrade Assessment Tool (UAT) 2012 beta for SCCM 2012 formerly known as Configuration Manager 2007 Application Compatibility Toolkit Connector

Taken directly from MS Connect site:

Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Upgrade Assessment Tool is a feature pack download that provides administrative users with information that they can use to determine if the operating system on computers that are managed by System Center 2012 Configuration Manager can be upgraded to Windows 7 or Windows 8. The previous version of this tool was the Configuration Manager 2007 Application Compatibility Toolkit Connector (ACT Connector).

Features:

· Retrieves device driver compatibility for installed peripheral devices and creates reports that you can use to determine which device drivers need to be upgraded to support the Windows operating system.

· Allows you to see which computers meet the recommended system requirements for Windows operating systems and to customize these requirements for your environments.

· Creates summary reports that you can use to see an enterprise wide view of operating system upgrade readiness.

· Allows you to create dynamic collections for an operating system deployment. The collection query rules can be based on system requirements, application compatibility status, and device driver status.

Pre-requisites:

Please note that the Beta version of the Upgrade Assessment Tool requires the ConfigMgr SP1 Beta and the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 6.0 which is available in the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for Windows 8.

 

More information and download link for the tool can be find on Connect site.

Virtual Machine Generation ID Documentation

Virtual Machine Generation ID is a new technology that is present on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. This is the technology which will allows to have virtual Domain Controllers on Server 2012. You can find the documentation about this technology here.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Update 1

MDT is a free tool provided by Microsoft that will help you deploy Windows Operating Systems. Key changes in the new version are:

  • Added support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
  • Support for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 CTP: Added support in MDT for deploying Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 with Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 CTP, while supporting all new Configuration Manager functionality (offline BitLocker, UEFI, and Assessment and Deployment Kit).
  • Support for DaRT 8 Beta: Updated MDT to support DaRT 8 for Windows 8 deployments, while continuing to support DaRT 7 for Windows 7 deployments. Added DaRT support for Configuration Manager scenarios.
  • New “Build Your Own Pages” User-Driven Installation (UDI) feature: Enhanced the UDI wizard and designer to enable IT pros to design their own wizard pages with little effort.
  • New System Center 2012 – Orchestrator support: Provided the ability to add steps into an OS deployment task sequence to execute Orchestrator runbooks as part of the deployment process.
  • Other improvements: Added support for Windows PowerShell 3.0, reworked Roles and Features installation logic for Windows 8, improved “boot from VHD” deployment scenarios, and added support for Configuration Manager monitoring.

Download the tool and its documentation from here.