The 1E webinars aren’t like other company’s webinars.
What sets us apart is not only our expertise but our ability to take high-level concepts and share them with the community. In our latest, members from our team, Troy Martin and Dave Fuller showed off Tachyon’s prowess alongside Windows Servicing Suite to demonstrate the perfect solution to having an automated Windows management system.
Don’t worry if you missed it: you can catch up in the full recording here. Below are some questions that were asked during the live webinar. If you have something you’d like to ask, get in touch! We’re always happy to speak with you.
Question: How do I leverage 1E beyond the period of Windows 10 Migration?
Answer: The 1E Windows Servicing Suite is about much more than the initial migration to Windows 10. Along with the monthly Quality Updates that are each around 1GB in size, there are Feature Upgrades twice per year, each around 3GB. Add that to all the day-to-day software distribution and updates that you need to deploy and that’s a lot of content! The peer-to-peer content distribution provided by Nomad is going to ensure all that content does not bring your network to a crawl.
Replacing computers is also an ongoing process and the Windows Servicing Suite ensures users can initiate the process of backing up their data from the old PC. The replacement PC can be ‘drop-shipped’ directly to the user and your image installed (the user simply boots up and presses F12), avoiding all the costs associated with having your vendor install your image before shipping it. And on top of that, the Windows Servicing Suite opens up self-service of all your applications, but can also be used to implement your own company ‘Windows Insider’ program for new Feature Upgrades – enabling select users to opt in and upgrade their devices ahead of the rest of the organization to start your validation process.
Question: If I want to change my device naming convention methodology with Windows 10 Migration… Could 1E help?
Answer: This can be handled in the Configuration Manager Task Sequence. You will find a number of blogs and articles on how to do this, but basically, it involves constructing the name according to your convention (probably using WMI properties) then setting the OSDComputerName Task Sequence variable to the new computer name. Here’s a good example from Nikolaj Andersen.
Question: How is application licensing handled?
Answer: The Application Migration feature in the 1E Windows Servicing Suite assumes you have licenses to apply the rules you define. For example, if a user had an application installed previously, the assumption is that it was licensed and can be reinstalled. If you define a rule to replace that application with something else, the assumption is you have are licensed to make such a replacement. Application Migration can help with reducing licensing costs as it allows you to choose not to install applications that were installed before the machine was migrated but not being used, thereby reclaiming the license for another user.
Question: What kind of load is placed on the network?
Answer: Deploying any OS, whether as a migration or upgrade or simply a refresh when things are not quite working, involves a huge amount of content being transferred to each machine. Nomad minimizes the load on your network by only downloading the content once across the WAN (using Reverse QoS™ to ensure all other network traffic has priority) and then sharing that content with peers in the same local network. Nomad also uses local peers to store USMT captured data and serve up PXE boot images – you won’t get less network traffic any other way.
Question: How selective is Nomad in regards to settings it retrieves?
Answer: The data and settings captured are all managed by the Microsoft User State Migration Tool (USMT) in the Task Sequence. Nomad is only concerned with managing the storage of that data while the machine is rebuilt or replaced. For more information on USMT check out this article.
Question: How does the Shopping server communicate with the config manager client?
Answer: When an item is requested from the Shopping portal and (if approval has been defined) the request is approved, Shopping adds the machine from which the request was made into a Collection that already has the requested item deployed to it. You can configure the Shopping server to connect to the target client and initiate a Configuration Manager policy refresh a few seconds (configurable) after it has added the device to the Collection, thereby causing the process to be started immediately without having to wait for the next random policy refresh cycle on the client. This requires the Shopping server service to have local admin rights on the client in order to invoke the CM client WMI method.
Don’t miss out on this week’s webinar featuring 1E’s Jason Keogh and Corix Partner’s JC Gaillard.
