Microsoft and VMWare deployments

Well as I've said before I tend to be involved in pretty much every area of IT. So now I've taken on Desktop Deployment- - I'm doing a Windows 2008 server -64bit, with SQL express 2008, with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008. It's not easy, but I'll get it working. Currently the plan is to do PE boot CD's to do the installs at least for the older machines, and at one point to start doing PXE booting. There's two methods here, and I'm going for a hybrid of them. Method one: is to use Windows Desktop Services (WDS) to push an image out to the machines. This'll be the base OS, with all the patches, IE 7, office pro 2007, along with a few IE plugins. Method two: is to use the windows deployment toolkit to install the os +Apps. Method Three (Hybrid method) is to push the base image out with ideally the default apps, and then have the deployment toolkit add any addit Then depending on the end user, it'll install adobe reader/writer. As well as some other proprietary apps. Ideally it'll do the installs based off of the dell service tags, and any additional apps that are needed after the image is deployed. I'll keep everyone posted on this. I also just started working on doing network installs of VMWare ESX to my hosts whenever there's a new version. This will also be my method in case of a Disaster to replace boxes, as I'll have a vm on usb that will allow me to redeploy the boxes. From my laptop if needbe.

The mug - but it's a coffee Mug

Yeah, I know my logo looks like a beer mug, and although it is sold as a beer mug and sometimes is used as one. I really am getting one for coffee, I mean it's cool and it's 22 oz. And I do some of my best programming after a beer or two. I end up reviewing the code in the morning but it's still usually some of my better coding. This probably explains why I'm not primarily a programmer. 1. I can't drink while working (it's an ethics/legal thing) 2. After the second beer I don't get much done granted it takes me 2-3 hours to get past the second beer. And hopefully someday someone out there will start reading my blog.

VMware PowerShell contest

Well for those of you who know/or care I participated in the VWAre PowerShell Contest. I didn't win :( some say I should have, some just don't say. The script I submitted basically shows you what services are on your vm's. At the moment it uses windows WMI to find the services on each box, to do this it uses powershell's WMI. And it can filter out most of the "standard" services thus showing you if it has a SQL instance, or a web service. This helps when you are trying to cut out extra services/processes from running on your boxes to increase performance and/or get more vm's on the same boxes. Yeah I know ESX server uses ram to consolidate things across vm's so there's less physical ram usage, great but it doesn't do that for processing. So do you really need the windows audio service in a VM? I've had it in a few. The other purpose is to findout what the heck your running. Fine if it's a webserver, but did you know it has a Postgres SQL and some other weird service that some guy wrote that you never knew existed? - And may just have a huge memory leak? In any case here's a link to it here. It's on googles document site which doesn't support .ps1 files so you have to rename it from a .txt to a .ps1. When I have time I'll start updating the script in between everything else.