martbasi

Hi,

For a long time when I've been making and deploying Win10/11 images, I have been pre-populating the license field with the generic KMS key, which the machines have no trouble using (though we've switched from KMS to on-prem AD activation, fwiw).

At the same time, once the machines are placed in their destination OU, they get hybrid-joined to Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) which introduces user-based licensing from the cloud ... which I presume supersedes/overrides the previous license/activation config.

I was pondering - do I need to make any changes in image creation or deployment config as a result of the new Azure-licensing method? Are there any new best practices in light of this? (eg, what if we ditched on-prem AD and went Azure-native?)

Cheers.

Seems to be resolved after deleting the ppk file and re-downloading it.

Pretty weird problem to have, but at least things are working now.

Hi,

I did submit a support ticket for this but just covering the bases by posting here also.

While troubleshooting issues with a NUC8 failing to get an IP from DHCP, I took a peek inside the PPK and it appears to be the wrong one. All the contents are for the Lenovo T480s.
Any chance this can be corrected?

 

Yay that I'm not the only one.

Changed the subject of my OP to maybe draw some attention. Powershell support for tasks that occur during the deploy wizard would be such an upgrade, even a selling point IMO.

Functionally, not that i can tell, works great.

In terms of the agreement, they stated above that it's not supported. Which I accept.

I just don't understand why not, why is powershell not made a native component of SmartPE? It's physically possible and has some great advantages, it seems a pity.

So I seem to have successfully added powershell to my SmartPE ISO.

Extracted the ISO, applied the steps in the MS link above to the boot.wim, regenerated a new ISO.

I sure wish SmartDeploy Media Wizard incorporated this. Having Powershell available opens up so many possibilities.

Feature request

Thanks for the response ... I wonder if SmartPE media could be modified as described here...

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn605289.aspx

Hey,

Just wondering if anyone knows whether it's possible to run powershell commands/scripts in the SmartPE, eg, in the POSTIMAGE phase?

Edit: changed subject.

I'm seeing this behavior as well, pretty exasperating to lose all those customizations.

Checking the box to enable local admin, and setting the pw to be identical to what is already configured in the source VM (fwiw).

SD Enterprise 2.0.1010.7.

In case it's of help to someone in future ...

Probably someone can do this better than me, but here's the powershell code i put in a script that is baked into the captured image.

The .ps1 is called by a batch file since I also use that to first set the Remote Execution policy to unrestricted.

Batch file is run "Upon first boot as system", uses the script below to check if the file server is reachable. When it is, it then goes on to robocopy all the desired scripts and installers to a local path, then executes them.

# Variables
$RemoteBox = "myservername"
$RemoteBoxTest = Test-Connection -Count 1 -ComputerName $RemoteBox -Quiet
$RemoteBoxTestCount = 1
$RetriesMax = 7
$RetriesInterval = 10

# Check if we're online with a Test-Connection to the server
# If we get no replies, we'll retry  every 10sec for up to 1 minute
While ($RemoteBoxTest -ne $true -and $RemoteBoxTestCount -lt $RetriesMax)
    {
    Start-Sleep -Seconds $RetriesInterval
    $RemoteBoxTestCount++
    $RemoteBoxTest = Test-Connection -Count 1 -ComputerName $RemoteBox -Quiet
    }
if ($RemoteBoxTest -ne $true -and $RemoteBoxTestCount -ge $RetriesMax)
    {
    throw "$RemoteBox unreachable by attempt number $RemoteBoxTestCount"
    }
else
    {
    #Do all the things!
    }

Ok, thinking out loud ... so perhaps a local kick-off script could go into the captured image, and it could repeatedly test-path ... and once the share is accessible, pull the remote scripts down and execute locally.

+1 for this ... and it would be nice to have a tool that can maintain a local replica of the ppk repository ... like with Lenovo's Update Retriever, or Dell Repository Manager.

Thx for the detailed response, interesting stuff.

I agree and certainly would not depend on this method as a means of backup (for that I'd use Veeam or similar) ... I was just curious what options might be available in a perfect-storm / comedy-of-errors disaster situation where the VM & backups of it vanished for whatever reason. Probably will never happen but still nice to know, in the back of my head.

Hi,

I was just curious if there is a way to apply an image to a VM without installing any PPK items or running sysprep ... thinking in terms of resurrecting a gold/master/source VM using Smart Deploy & a WIM, in case of accidental loss of VM data & backups. Perhaps a weird scenario, but like I said, I was curious.

Great - thanks for spelling that out so clearly.

As I said, new to deployment

Got this working as suggested with a pre-image task. VBS makes its edit to T:\windows\panther\unattend.xml

Hi,

I suspect the answer is obvious, but rather than depend on my own assumtions, it would be cool if someone could actually tell me ...

... when there is a default.ppk that combines numerous makes & models, does that entire driver library get installed during deployment?

Or is it selective, installing only drivers that are relevant to the hardware detected?

Thx.

I added an "After image is applied" task that ran the vbs and seemed to successfully update the \Windows\Panther\unattend.xml file in the freshly imaged drive ... this is what's used by sysprep when the imaged OS boots right?

But it didn't take, as if something reverted/overwrote it again after my process ... the computer booted up with the old, pre-task name, derived from SmartDeploy.xml.