This Windows 7 deployment is a 11,000 seat deployment and when I joined, the image was just about finalized. At this point the heavy lifting of planning, and figuring out what is in the environment was completed, but let me help you walk through your planning.

The first thing you need to do is get a sense of what your hardware is. In our environment,we have a tool that was developed to track that information. But you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, Microsoft makes a great tool FREE tool called MAP, Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit. You run this tool against your AD computer and then you get a great report of what is in your environment and what the capability of the computers are.

After running this tool, you should also be using the Application Compatibility Toolkit, another free tool. This application runs creates an MSI that is run on workstations. I push it out with GPO but you can use any tool you have to push MSIs out. This tool then runs for a predetermined amount of time (you set that) and then it returns what applications are installed and how much it has been used. From that report, it will make a list of what you have running for applications and which ones are supported on Windows 7. It also contains fixes for common application which won’t work natively with Windows 7. We used this tool to fix AutoCad 7 when it wouldn’t work correctly with Windows 7.

So, those two tools will help you get planning your Windows 7 deployment. Use these two tools, gather your information and plan your deployment. Good planning upfront will prevent a lot of a pain in the deployment phase.

In another post, I will cover off the deployment side.

Netflix gets the most use here at the house, followed by the Roger’s on Demand app, the others, not so much use. I do have a Roger’s cell phone which allows me to get more the programs you would get without the application. There are programs from various channels like CBC, CityTV and Treehouse (always a hit with the 2yr old).

For these applications to work, you need Xbox Gold, which is kind of a kick but considering you might pay $80.00/month for cable, I guess it is bit of a deal.

I am in the final phase of staging our Palo Alto 5050 in the office. We are planning to deploy this unit as both an edge and datacentre firewall.

It’s a pretty nifty device. Before even implementing it, we have been able to use it in what’s called TAP mode to look at what kind of traffic is traversing our network. It’s very surprising to see what is chewing up bandwidth. The biggest surprise for me was iCloud. I couldn’t believe the gigs of data being transferred back and forth from Apple.

One of the caveats I have found so far with setting it up is when you setup your captive portal to pick up guest users. We created both a guest account for truly guest users but also give the end user a chance to authenticate using AD credentials on the captive portal for more access.  Your authentication has to be local database first before your LDAP lookup in the AD. Otherwise it tries to authenticate in AD first, then gives up without checking the local database.

Check out the Microsoft TechNet site at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-8. You will find all kinds of information which will help you get the most learning out of this consumer preview.

While I am out on the west coast this week, I noticed March’s session for OWSUG has been announced. Register and check it out. Mitch is a great presenter and friend, you won’t be disappointed. If you are thinking of looking at VDI, do yourself a favour and check out his session.

Architecting and Supporting the Back-End Infrastructure for the Consumerization of IT

This two-hour session will show you how to plan for, build, and manage your VDI environment on Microsoft’s Hyper-V, using Citrix’s Xen Desktop and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage it, including creating templates, easy provisioning, and improving the end-user experience. Come see how you can make your life easier while giving the end user what they want in a safe and secure way!

Register for the event here: http://www.eventbrite.ca/event/2953282347

Bio:

Mitch Garvis is a Renaissance Man of the IT world. Aside from being a partner with SWMI Consulting Group, he is a Virtual Partner Technology Advisor for Microsoft Canada and has contributed to numerous certification exams for Microsoft Learning. He seems to collect certifications, and trains on a variety of topics including System Center, server virtualization, desktop deployment, and security. We think that parts of Windows 7 really were his idea. You can read his blog at www.garvis.ca, or follow him on Twitter as @MGarvis. He makes his home outside Toronto where he has one wife, two kids, two dogs, and two minutes to himself per day.

Brad’s comment: Mitch is a good friend and colleague and always does a great job presenting.  Come out and see him in March.

The article does a good job listing out some of the high level features which are new to Windows Server 8 or improved from Windows Server 2008 R2.

For me, my top 3 features which I think are good are:

NIC Teaming – In the past you relied on hardware vendors to support NIC teaming. Now in Windows Server 8, we can have two separate NIC by different vendors be teamed together to provide redundancy and aggregate bandwidth.

• AD Recycle Bin – Windows Server 2008 R2 first had the recycle bin, but you had to access it through scripting. Now we have a GUI to restore items.
• Live Migration – Looks like Microsoft is putting Live Migration right into the native Hyper-V and won’t require Virtual Machine Manager. This something we have had for a while in VMWare with Live Motion and VMM 2008 R2 w/SP1 but now we have it for free native to Windows Server 8.

For the full list, check out the post at PC Magazine.

Link to – “10 Killer Features in Windows Server 8 for IT Pros”

We headed to one of the elementary schools and started investigating. I used wire shark to sniff the port of the computer we were testing with and I used the Sysinternal tools. We were able to replicate a slow login and started using gpupdate /force. If it updated with one specific DC, it would take somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 minutes to update. It would take 45 seconds against the rest of the domain controllers. I also noticed the workstation was receiving the policy file 2 bytes at a time.

This was odd, so we decided to vMotion the virtual machine which is the DC to a different host. This fixed the issue and the updates were about 45 seconds now. So wanting to know if the problem was a host problem, we moved the virtual machine back to the original host and it still worked keeping our logins at 45 seconds. Not entirely sure what was happening but happy to have fixed the problem, we headed back to the office.

We checked in with Tier 1 support and let them know we solved it, not certain it would be a long term fix and wanted to made aware of any further calls.

The next day the calls were back. So I used the IT techs favourite troubleshooting tool.

Google.

I found this KB article. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319440. The machines that were affected were for sure Windows XP machines. I can’t remember now if we saw this behaviour on our Windows 7 computers. But at that point, we had just began our 11,000 seat Windows 7 deployment.

I added the entry I typed up here to the Group Policy preference to the GPO that was applied against the computers being affected.

Registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Entry: BufferPolicyReads
Type: DWORD
Value: 1

Once this change was made, we update Group Policy and then headed to a school. It also had the benefit that good gpupdates went from 45 seconds to 15 seconds.

I am working on an implementation of Unified Access Gateay (UAG) SP1 for our DirectAccess implementation here at the board.

The TechNet articles in the deployment guide specify that you must use NLB in Unicast Mode for the deployment.  The guide is located at http://bit.ly/tirUga

If you are using VMWare to host your UAG Array, you know that Unicast NLB has its issues. After doing some searching I discovered this Blog, http://bit.ly/sX7sgX which says that  you can use multicast NLB for UAG Sp1 and that the documentation is incorrect.

TechDays 2011 is coming up soon. Next week in fact. As in past years I’ll be presenting. This year I will be presenting in Toronto and Montreal and the subject will be Securing your Wireless Network using Active Directory and 802.1x

This year TechDays will be taking place in the following cities so make sure to register

1. Toronto – October 25-26
2. Vancouver – November 15-16
3. Montreal – November 29-30

If you  register for TechDays 2011, use this promo code TDSPKR11CAN to get 50% off the conference admission!

My presentation is the first day, last session of the day. So it will be me that keeps you from the door. Be prepared to laugh a little in the session.

I look forward to seeing you all there this year and I will be hanging around all day probably in the experts lounge. Stop by and say hi.

My first thought was, “I wonder if I could write a couple apps.”, followed by “I wonder if fart apps count?” Check my Twitter stream, I did actually ask that question.

The rules actually say those apps have to be quality applications. Which means, no fart apps which was Joey’s battle cry when he worked for the Empire.

Which means, probably no developing for me. Fart apps, flashlight, I probably could do. Something like Beiber smash, might be tricky but do-able. Quality, not a chance you’ll see anything by me.

But if you can develop, and actually make something good, go to http://www.microsoft.com/canada/offers-promotions/mango-app-challenge/ and take the challenge.

So my pilot was to check out the implemenation guide, see how it works for encrypting the drive. The issue I did have so far was clients not checking in with the MBAM Server. What I found was a registry hack that needed to be done. The hack is this (from the TechNet forums):

Add a registry key on MBAM server under HKLM\Software\Microsoft
Create a new key called MBAM and then create a new Dword 32-bit value called DisableMachineVerification and set to 1

After you do this, on client restart the MBAM client service and then this issue should be resolved.

I performed that step and I was off to the races. The computer checked in to MBAM and then prompted me to encrypt the drive.  Another next step is to provide some automation for our imaging process.

A couple of features that really stand out for me, the new Ribbon and File Menu.

 
First off, they talk about stats. One of those stats is the most commonly entered commands and how they are invoked. Here is a graph of the most common commands called.

Paste doesn’t surprise me as the most used command. What does surprise me is the properties is #2. I figured it would be Copy, Delete or Cut which end up as 3,4 and 7. So they changed the Ribbon menu to reflect this as seen below. Of those only two were on the ribbon bar, so they changed the ribbon bar so that users didn’t have to go looking for the commands.

The file menu has also been fixed up and an awesome feature which I love already, for invoking the command prompt; a separate, run as admin menu option.

Widescreens

They also mention they are optimizing this for wider screens which are common place now. If you have an LCD, chances are now its a 16X9 or some sort of widescreen fashion. Microsoft’s stats say that 1366 x 768 is the most common screen resolution.

The video that goes along with this is Building Windows 8 – Windows Explorer Features. Or check out the blog at Building Windows 8 Blog

Now That’s something that was missing from Windows 7 that I could use from time to time. I sometimes get  crazy and start multiple copy jobs and have to cancel one so that I can get one done sooner. Nifty feature.

Here is the Building Windows 8 Video.

The full details can be found at http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/08/windows-phone-mangos-wi-fi-hotspot-secret.ars

I for one am looking forward to that. I can use it to quickly get online with my laptop when no WiFi is available. I have an android device (Samsung 551) that can do hotspot as well, but my Samsung Focus is my main device and its a pain having to SIM swap.

It contains the Exchange 2010 change called out in  KB Article 2543879: PDF attachment from a Mac Mail client is not displayed when you use Outlook 2010 to open the email message in an Exchange Server 2007 SP3 environment.

I have seen this problem more and more lately.We can’t see the PDF file as an attachment at all in Outlook but can see the attachment fine on our mobile devices.

Go to http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/08/23/released-update-rollup-5-for-exchange-2010-sp1.aspx to get more information.