strawberry

are you going all virtual? I would leave dpm and 1 dc as physical.

So its not likely a network problem, Check the event logs on the servers, check the services, check the resources being used. Disconnect the servers from the network, reboot them, then reconnect.

Check your fileservers and domain controllers, Prehaps reboot them?

if your going to virtualise you need to look at some sort of redundency, if your using hyper v for isntance using a cluster would give you redunancy and options for moving vm's

LCDS and hotpoatoes both for Scorm Type content generation.

It can be done, i'd use something like DPM to reduce software costs, Build a cheap san using SATA and stick an lto 4 tape drive in it. Or buy another lto3 and use 2 tapes per night, as its doing continuous backup you can get it to dump one tape overnight and one during the day without affecting performance.

mate of mine did that with a box of cereal he had added milk too ( dont ask.) unfortunately I was sat directly behind him.

Your quite right. Untill they take said laptop away from the server, which of course can be worked around using offline files but thats just going to cause more inconvenience when they lose control of it. Point is their percieved convenience isn't always going to give them the results they expect/desire sometimes they just need to be educated to make the best of what they have.

You could redirect there desktops, but ultimately they are being lazy. They just want what they're used to at home and have little idea/caring that what they are doing is bad practice. These are people that will tend to buy a new machine when things get a little slow.

its not free, but have a look at dpm, it costs peanuts and gives you a world of functionality.

engage support is awful, patronising and if they're not ever seen the problem before and cant diagnose the problem from a sheet then its obviously your fault.

you cant, the only gui you can bring from a computer your controlling with psexec is the command line. vnc might be a better option for what your trying to do.

other fun way to do it is to create a virtual machine! New Physical to Virtual (P2V) tool from Sysinternals - Virtual Varia - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Driveimagexml.. only ever done offline. and imagex i'm not sure i've always done it from windows pe or using mdt.

you can use imagex to create a wim file, or something like driveimagexml which can be run from bartpe. Also nt backup is fairly reliable.

find a decent old box or a vm, install mdt, it'll ask for a few other downloads including waik which is a bit hefty. From there you then import your operating systems, and configure your unattend.txt file (loads on here can provide examples). you then import your apps and add the command line syntax for installing them ( or use a gui for office) , most of the details are on appdeploy ( this also means you have command line suntax to hand so can use something like psexec to run the commandline on a remote machine, thereby installing an app remotely). Again, we can help with that on here. You can then generate a cd to boot from on the new pc, this can either have all the info on it or can call back to the server for the files. then you select your os (or image) and which applications you want to install. From there you can then to things like capture images etc etc, the only thing wds really adds to this is the ability to pxe boot and use multicast so far as i can see. edit:// you also import the drivers en mass, so no more fiddling with the sysprep inf file!

before you get to involved look at MDT , the microsoft deployment toolkit. Its how you create the images to be deployed, it contains its own deployment method as well so you may not need WDS. It will allow you to create an answerfile for a windows install and will allow you to add packages to deploy software.

easyest way i can think of is to use mdt.

the cluster servers are still available as host servers, the only difference is they can now share a lun for storing vhds. they also have the benefit of being able to to do live migration.

If you only do one thing this week, take my advice!. Get yourself a testout mcse course. 50 hours of video, notes, tutorials ,sims and practise tests. Better than any training course and make sure work give you at least a week off to study the material. Dont do the server 2008 courses yet, simply because the xp/2k3 training track was based on job, (mcdst = 1st line desktop, mcsa = network admin, mcse = network engineer) the new track is based on technology (mcitp:est , desktop tech, mcitp:sa server admin, mcitp:ea enterprise admin, mcitp:va virtalisation admin). Do a MCSA first, the mcse is overkill for all but those who will design multi domain networks. Once you've done the MCSA then consider upgrading your skills to the MCITP:SA . Ms press books will give you info for the exams , but they're boring and biased and dont give you real world knowledge. Use testout, possibly cybex books and something like cbt nuggets. all of which can be picked up second hand or even available as free demos. look on forums like techexams.net and certforum.co.uk

do a manual sysprep then use the capture task. reason being the sysprep task is designed for to sysprep an image that mdt has already deployed. you'll need to add your own sysprep.inf/unattend.txt into the task rather than the image.

its chicken and egg. An mcsa is useful, but you wont be a rounded employee without having the experience. You could buy books and read those whilst you work day to day in a junior role, there are also training videos and software available on the internet.£2500 seems a lot, and 8 weeks seems almost too little to me, i'd dip your toe before you jump in at the deep end.

i'm also very interested in doing this, but i'd like to run it from a cd if possible. if not, happy to run it from the hdd if someone could point me in the right direction!

Hello Cybernerd, This is exactly what I would like to do but am stuggling. Are there any pointers you could provide?.

beter way is to declare the wsus server in customsettings.ini then you can call the updates before and after the applciation installation ( always useful for making sure .net is installed!)

in customsetings.ini use SkipLocaleSelection=YES UILanguage=en-GB UserLocale=en-GB SkipTimeZone=YES