Overview: Periodically Microsoft and other vendors release updates to the management packs in System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). It is important to update packs to current versions to ensure stability as well as the latest monitoring functionality. This procedure will outline how to check for updates and install the latest management packs.
Procedure:
One of the new features of SCCM 2012 R2 is that it supports building Virtual Hard Disks from SCCM which can then be used for many different purposes such as testing a new image or using as a virtual machine template.
Applocker is a very important tool that system administrators to protect against malware and unauthorized applications from running on systems. This is especially useful to protect against malware such as crytolocker. While Applocker is very easy to implement, it lacks some of the reporting and alerting that administrators need to successfully respond to false positives such as business critical applications. By itself applocker does not have the ability to produce the statistics that are critical to justify the extra security measures (showing the number of non-authorized exe’s blocked). SCOM fills in the gap by offering a very powerful tool that is designed to alert and report applocker blocks / warnings for systems.
Overview with the release of ADK 8.1 support for Windows XP is no longer available. As a result administrators that wish to migrate from XP to Windows 7 using SCCM will have to use the ADK 8.0 to generate boot media. In addition to using a legacy PE image, administrators will also want to be sure that hotfix KB2910552 is also installed (see: https://davejaskie.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/system-center-configuration-manager-sccm-2012-r2-and-xp-migrations-require-hotfix-2910552-to-ensure-no-ntldr-missing-error/ ). This procedure will also work for importing other wims with other customizations
For many different reasons, administrators may want to have an image backup of a machine. SCCM along with the integrated MDT tools, give administrators a simple solution for creating wim based backups of machine, which can be fully restored if the machine has problems. In addition for complex tasks, this can be incorporated as part of the sequence for a complete backup of a computer before imaging with a new operating system.
Continue reading
On the surface it can appear that the options for capturing and restoring user states in SCCM is very limited. However all of the advanced options that can be manually run with scanstate.exe and loadstate.exe can be leveraged in SCCM task sequences. In this example we will set one of the advanced options to only capture users that have logged in in the past 30 Days (/uel:30). There are plenty of additional options including options to support cross domain migrations.
Continue reading
