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MDT 2010 New Feature #11: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support

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A few people asked why I hadn’t talked about support for these new OSes yet.  First, these were mentioned in the original announcements so you’ve probably already heard about that, and second, I said I would mention new features in no particular order.

So yes, MDT 2010 Beta 2 fully supports Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 release candidate builds.  The deployment process for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is very similar to that used with Windows Vista, so you may not immediately notice any difference.  (We use the same unattend.xml templates for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2, which tells you how similar they really are.)  There are a few differences that we’ve encountered, but our scripts hide those so you probably will never notice.

With Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the Windows team recommends creating two partitions, a small partition for the boot files and a large partition for the operating systems.  The minimum size for the small partition is 100MB, but MDT 2010 uses 300MB to make sure that there is enough space for a Windows Recovery Environment (Windows PE-based) WIM.  This partition will automatically be created when performing a “new computer” deployment using Lite Touch.  (There is a variable, DoNotCreateExtraPartition, that can be set to “YES” via CustomSettings.ini to skip this if you want to purposely ignore the Windows team’s recommendations.)

MDT 2010 Beta 2 also supports deploying Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 using the ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 beta, which is available on https://connect.microsoft.com, so be sure to try that beta (in a lab, of course) too.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hello Michael This particular post makes me wonder if there is an easy way to use mdt to update a server 2008 machine to server 2008 R2, keeping the installed roles and their settings? Or is this job for Configuration Manager? Regards Pieter-Jan

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi Michael, Following MDT 2010 Beta 2's release, we've deployed the workbench and related tools. The upgrade from Beta 1 worked flawlessly and it solved all of the issues we were having with Beta 1. We have begun our live rollout of our new Windows 7 RC1 image into our production environment as part of a structured pilot program and so far the users are all absolutely thrilled. The majority of them were on XP before, so '7' is a huge step forward. We've had a few little issues, particularly with USMT (migration of drive mappings and printers hasn't worked for us so far), and applications assigned to location or model in the database don't appear to deploy, I'm documenting these at the moment. But our overall experience has been very positive. Regards John