7185

I was complaining (more or less) several weeks ago about the amount of work it was going to take to upgrade my MCSE to the latest version. The good news is I went and did the Windows end of things and now I’m apparently an “MCITP: Enterprise Administrator”. Now compared to MCSE, no HR person is going to know what that means. Most folks are trained to look for MCSE and it’s going to be a long time before that mentality is changed I suspect. Personally if someone asks me if I have an MCSE or if I’m certified on … Continue reading Update on the MCSE Upgrade

So I have an MCSE: Messaging 2003. Took something like 7 or 8 tests to get that way back when and it’s still good. Being the good consultant that I am I decided I’d figure out what I need to do to get whatever the new equivelants are on Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007: The new Windows 2008 exam seems to be an “MCITP: Enterprise Administrator”: Windows 2003 MCSE upgrade Test Windows Vista Test Windows 2008 Enterprise Administrator Test OK so, three tests total for an upgrade. That’s a lot of test questions, but, seeing as my transcript says I took … Continue reading Upgrading my MCSE

Normally in VMWare when you go “VM>Install VMWare Tools…” with a Windows guest, autorun kicks right in and the installer launches. On server core this isn’t the case. You need to launch the MSI by hand. To do this, swich to your CD drive (e.g. “D:”), and then launch the MSI manually: msiexec /i “VMware Tools.msi” The MSI will launch, but at least for me it appeared hung shortly into the install. There are a couple DLLs it tries to load which aren’t in the server core image. The errors about this are hidden behind the installer so if you … Continue reading Loading VMWare 6 Tools on 2008 Server Core

I thought I’d document how to setup the new sysprep process equivalent on Windows 2008 since the old setupmgr file for making sysprep.inf’s doesn’t exist anymore (and neither does sysprep.inf). The first step is acquiring the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) from somewhere. You can get it from Microsoft’s website, MSDN subscriber downloads, and probably the volume licensing downloads site too I’d guess (though I haven’t checked). The ISO is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=94bb6e34-d890-4932-81a5-5b50c657de08&DisplayLang=en, and is about an 800MB install on my 2003 SP2 x86 box. You’ll also need to copy the install.wim from your 2008 DVD sources folder to the … Continue reading How to Sysprep in Windows 2008

I’m working on adding Windows 2008 to my lab and the first step of this for me anyway is making templates. The whole sysprep process in Vista and Windows 2008 has been completely re-engineered so I’m learning on the go here. Turns out you need to load the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) on a machine and then run the Windows System Image Manager to build the new XML based unattend files. Given this is an 800MB install (versus like 800K for the old setupmgr.exe) I decided to load it on my VMWare host machine which is Windows 2003 x64 … Continue reading Windows 2008 – Windows System Image Manager Error