Thursday 17 July 2008 - markwilson.it

One of the problems associated with virtualisation is “virtual sprawl” – the proliferation of virtual machines (which can totally negate the idea of “server consolidation” if not carefully controlled. Management becomes critical – and a key part of that management is patching virtual machines to keep the operating system and applications up to date.

But what about the virtual machines that exist as offline images (templates, test and development machines, etc.)?

I’ve written previously about the beta of Microsoft’s offline servicing tool for virtual machine images and last week it was completed and released to the web.

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and, according to Microsoft, it “combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell interface to bring groups of virtual machines online just long enough for them to receive updates from either System Center Configuration Manager 2007 or Windows Server Update Services. As soon as the virtual machines are up-to-date, the tool returns them to the offline state in the Virtual Machine Manager library”.

There’s an executive overview on the Microsoft TechNet site and the tool can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.

One of the reasons to use Windows PE for operating system deployment is that it’s built on a modern version of Windows so, at least in theory, driver support is less of an issue than it would be using MS-DOS boot disks.

Even so, there are still times when a good old MS-DOS boot disk comes in handy and networking is a particular pain point – NDIS drivers are a pain to configure so packet-level drivers are often useful for operating system deployment tasks (but not optimised for anything more substantial). Available for many of the more common Ethernet cards, they are generally 16-bit utilities for MS-DOS and so will not work in 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems.

As this is not exactly cutting edge technology, many of the useful sites are starting to drop off the ‘net (but a surprising number remain) – here’s a few links I found that might come in handy:

A complete description of MS-DOS TCP/IP connectivity.
Crynwr has a load of good stuff, including a selection of packet level drivers. The Intel EtherExpress PRO 100 packet driver is particularly useful.
Some more links to MS-DOS packet drivers together with nicscan.exe (a useful scanner for NIC cards, although I’m not sure if the database is still maintained and Craig Hart’s PCI/PCI32 may be more useful).
Symantec’s article on manually creating a Ghost network book disk contains useful information including a generic disk which simply requires the appropriate packet driver to be added) – basically, all that is required is:
1. Create an MS-DOS boot disk (bootdisk.com is a good source, or a blank formatted disk can have system files added to it using the sys command).
2. Add an appropriate packet driver for the selected NIC (e.g. E100B.COM for an Intel EtherExpress PRO 100).
3. Load the driver using by calling it from the autoexec.bat file (e.g. by adding the line e100b.com 0x60 to the end of the file).
4. Create a file called wattcp.cfg with the following contents:
  IP=IPaddress (or leave blank if using DHCP)
  NETMASK=255.255.255.0 (this is a C-class Subnet, change if needed)

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Day: Thursday 17 July 2008

Microsoft’s Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool has been released

Using packet level drivers for MS-DOS network connectivity