Image Capture: VPC vs VMWare

Just thought I may be able to save someone else out there a headache..

Although I am typically a much bigger proponent of VMWare products in terms of performance I found out the hard way that building and capturing an image from VMWare (Server 2.0) works great in most cases for newer hardware. I also discovered that the “IDE” mass storage driver in VMWare Server 2.0 would not allow the image to boot on older hardware (think Latitude D800, 600, etc). I spent a couple of days trying to find a set of driver that I could inject to get the machines working but to no avail. I had used Virtual PC 2007 in the past to build and capture but the performance is so lacking compared to VMWare I figured I would start there first. Well a long story short, after I went back to using Virtual PC 2007 (SP1) as my base machine for build and capture my “older” hardware is now back to booting properly and my newer hardware continues to function by injecting their mass storage drives as needed.

The moral of the story? Use Virtual PC 2007 to build and capture your image! Then you can turn it off and use VMWare for everything else.

SMS_SQL_MONITOR Service Fails after upgrade to SCCM

After upgrading my SMS 2003 SP2 site to SCCM 2007 SP1 the “SMS_SQL_MONITOR” service would fail to start stating Error 2: Cannot find the specified file.

I finally figured out (by stumbling across the website below) that this service is an SMS 2003 service only and is not required for SCCM. Apparently this is a bug in the Setup that doesn’t remove this service for you..

*I should also note that I verified that this service does not exists in my clean install of SCCM in my Lab.

Instructions on removing this service here:
http://blogs.technet.com/alipka/archive/2008/07/22/sccm-sp1-slipstream-setup-on-sms-2003-sp2-sp3-site-fails-to-remove-sms-sql-monitor-service.aspx

SCCM: Interactive Software install during Task Sequence

When building my base OS for capturing there always seems to something that cant be automated or is a royal pain to automate. Using the SCCM TS “Software Install” it has to be completely non interactive. This present a challenge for something you may want to install by hand. Here’s a trick to get around that:

Turn on the command shell capability in the Boot Image and when your in your “State Restore” phase press F8 to open a command window. Viola! you can now map a drive to a network share and execute (interactively) anything you like.