Microsoft PowerShell Deployment Toolkit - Automatically deploy System Center 2012

[Arthur]

Have you ever wanted to automatically deploy the entire System Center 2012 suite in a couple of hours? If so, this is what you need.

 

Website / Download

 

Internally at Microsoft, with every milestone during development – CTP, Beta, RC, RTM – we rebuild the SCDemo environment to allow our field to learn the new capabilities we are delivering. PDT is the automation we use to do those rebuilds very quickly – usually in 2-4 hours. Yes, just 2-4 hours to deploy all of System Center including SQL and all prerequisites in a highly available configuration including all of the automatable post-setup integration. We want to provide you with the same efficiency.

 

It is going to take a whole series of posts to explain all of the capabilities of PDT, so I’ll start in this post with a simple overview and sample deployment. PDT requires that the servers that System Center will be deployed to are already running, members of an Active Directory domain, and you have administrator permissions to those servers. They can be physical or virtual, and can even be on any virtualization platform – PDT doesn’t care. They just need to be running Windows Server – and in most cases, that can be either Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2008 R2. The only exceptions to this are that the server for the Virtual Machine Manager Management server must be Windows Server 2012, and the server for the Service Manager SharePoint Web Parts server must be Windows Server 2008 R2. You will also need all the software to be used in the deployment – System Center components, SQL Server, and prerequisite software – downloaded and available in a specific folder structure.

[TheScarfedOne]

Good spot, thanks

[woodham]

fantastic just what i have been looking for practice labs here we come.....

[Arthur]

The latest version of PDT (released last month) now supports the SCCM 2012 R2 Preview.

 

Download: gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PowerShell-Deployment-822d44c7

 

PowerShell Deployment Toolkit v2.5 has now been posted to the TechNet Gallery here. Version 2.5 adds a number of enhancements:

 

• Deployment of System Center 2012 R2 Preview.
  
• Creation of Active Directory during VM creation for end to end isolated environment creation.
  
• Static ports for SQL Server named instances to remove requirement for default instances for several components.
  
• Validation of components that require full server installations and won’t run on server core.
  
• Ability for VMCreator to use either 7-Zip or WinRAR instead of just WinRAR.
  
• Ability to specify network adapter identifier during VM creation to allow Windows Server 2008 R2 and non-English OS installation.
  
• Ability to specify timezone during VM creation.
  

Several of the above will the topics of further blog posts in the next few weeks, so stay tuned! (Source)