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MDT 2012 RC1 Cross-platform deployment issue - the curious case of the disappearing WS 2008 x64 tasksequences!

Answered MDT 2012 RC1 Cross-platform deployment issue - the curious case of the disappearing WS 2008 x64 tasksequences!

  • Tuesday, March 27, 2012 10:00 AM
     
     
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    Hi everyone,

    I've used MDT for our company's installation server to deploy various Windows Server OS versions for our customers and our test environments. I've started testing MDT 2012 RC1 for this deploymentshare and came across a perculiar issue with the cross-platform deployment feature. All my 32-bit and 64-bit tasksequences show up in my MDT wizard (even the WS 2003 ones) and can be deployed using the 32-bit litetouch PE except for 64-bit 2008 TS's. They're not showing up in the wizard! At first I thought this was because of an issue with the image's flags not matching the 32-bit image but I've corrected that using imagex and still they're not present in the tasksequence pane:

    Does anyone have a clue as to why this is happening? I've tested cross-platform deployment with MDT 2012 beta 1 and did not have this issue using the same deploymentshare! If this is indeed a bug in RC1 please correct this Microsoft! I'm a big MDT fan and would like to upgrade our deploymentshare to 2012 as soon as possible!

    Thanks in advance for your thoughts on my mysterious case!

    Kind regards,

    MicaH

     

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  • Friday, March 30, 2012 5:42 AM
     
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    This is by design:  It's not possible to do a cross-platform installation of Windows Server 2008 using Windows PE 3.0.  Windows Server 2008 only supports doing this using Windows PE 2.0, and MDT no longer supports Windows PE 2.0.  Because of this, we filter Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 task sequences from the list.

    Thanks, -Michael Niehaus Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit mniehaus@microsoft.com http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus

    • Marked As Answer by MicaH_Z Friday, March 30, 2012 11:39 AM
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  • Friday, March 30, 2012 7:47 AM
     
     
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    This is by design:  It's not possible to do a cross-platform installation of Windows Server 2008 using Windows PE 3.0.  Windows Server 2008 only supports doing this using Windows PE 2.0, and MDT no longer supports Windows PE 2.0.  Because of this, we filter Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 task sequences from the list.

    Thanks, -Michael Niehaus Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit mniehaus@microsoft.com http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus

    Ah, that explains a lot. I guess I can create a custom single instance storage wimfile for 2008 x64 editions. The same thing works for the WS 2003 deployment. Thanks Michaël. I look forward to your session on MDT 2012 in Amsterdam this june. See you there and thanks for developing such a great tool for us IT geeks. ?}:^)>

    PS. Is the RTM going to include a wizard pane for partitioning? I was told by your colleague Mike Lewis that it's on the wishlist but it's not there yet. I've created my own custom pane which sets the OSDPartitions0Size variable but for some reason that won't work when deploying custom wimfiles. It'll then use the entire disk. Any thoughts on this? Or should I create a seperate topic for this question?

     
  • Friday, March 30, 2012 7:53 AM
     
     
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    Just be aware that the Windows Server 2008 SETUP.EXE will fail if it attempts to do a cross-platform deployment of that OS.  (The same failure will happen when using DISM /apply-unattend.)

    MDT 2012 won't include a partitioning pane.  What you see in MDT 2012 RC1 is final, from a functionality standpoint - all we're doing now is fixing bugs.  We will revisit the partitioning pane for the next version of MDT, which is due out in the Windows 8 timeframe.

    See you in Amsterdam :-)

    Thanks, -Michael Niehaus Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit mniehaus@microsoft.com http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus

     
  • Friday, March 30, 2012 7:55 AM
     
     
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    My guess on the partition size:  It's probably creating the partition using the size that you've specified, but it's then extending the partition to take up the entire disk.  The logs would confirm that though.

    Thanks, -Michael Niehaus Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit mniehaus@microsoft.com http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus

     
  • Friday, March 30, 2012 11:01 AM
     
     
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    Just be aware that the Windows Server 2008 SETUP.EXE will fail if it attempts to do a cross-platform deployment of that OS.  (The same failure will happen when using DISM /apply-unattend.)

    MDT 2012 won't include a partitioning pane.  What you see in MDT 2012 RC1 is final, from a functionality standpoint - all we're doing now is fixing bugs.  We will revisit the partitioning pane for the next version of MDT, which is due out in the Windows 8 timeframe.

    See you in Amsterdam :-)

    Thanks, -Michael Niehaus Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit mniehaus@microsoft.com http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus

    What I meant was I can deploy w2k8 on a VM, capture it to a wimfile and later on create a SIS from the different versions (std, ent, dct). No setup.exe is needed to deploy a captured wimfile. This works with 2003 so it wiil work on 2008 as well.

    As for the partition issue: is there any way to prevent the partition from extending?

     
  • Tuesday, May 29, 2012 11:41 AM
     
     
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    This is by design:  It's not possible to do a cross-platform installation of Windows Server 2008 using Windows PE 3.0.  Windows Server 2008 only supports doing this using Windows PE 2.0, and MDT no longer supports Windows PE 2.0.  Because of this, we filter Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 task sequences from the list.

    Thanks, -Michael Niehaus Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit mniehaus@microsoft.com http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus

    After a lot of tinkering and googling I've discovered that in order to get cross-platform deployment of WS 2008 x64 working with PE 3.0 all you have to do is copy an older version of bootstr.dll into the system32 folder in PE 3.0, overwriting the newer version. You can get the dll from a PE 2.0 image or from a 32-bit Server 2008 server. After that the deployment works beautifully (both using 32-bit setup files and ImageX /apply). I've added a command in my task sequence to do just that.

    The only thing left to do now is to get rid of the filter which prevents 64-bit Server 2008 OS task sequences to show up in the deployment wizard. I've been going through the scripts but I can't seem to find the script responsible for the filtering. You'd think it'd be the DeployWiz_SelectTS.vbs script but no. Does anyone know what script is used for the filtering of Task Sequences?


    • Edited by MicaH_Z Tuesday, May 29, 2012 11:51 AM
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  • Tuesday, May 29, 2012 3:49 PM
     
     
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    The filtering is performed by the CustomTSFilter function in DeployWiz_Initialization.vbs.

    Of course what you are doing is completely unsupported by Microsoft.

    Thanks, -Michael Niehaus Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit mniehaus@microsoft.com http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus

     
  • Monday, February 11, 2013 5:40 PM
     
     
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    MicaH_Z,

    Were you ever able to work around this and get the 2008 64bit task sequences to show up using the 32bit boot image?

    I'm currently trying to accomplish the same thing.

    Thanks,

    Carlos