Upgrading Hyper-V integration components via SCCM

Keeping Hyper-V integration components up to date on all your hyper-V guests has a few options, Powershell and SCO being the common ones…. but im one of these whacky people that likes to keep deployment tasks within my deployment tool – SCCM.

Unfortunately, the integration services version doesn’t seem to be exposed via properties exposed by default to SCCM, such as hardware inventory (which includes add/remove programs).

Due to this, we have to use software inventory.

To this end, I enable software inventory for C:\Windows\System32\drivers\vmbus.sys

The version of this, once reported, isn’t quite clean. Instead of 6.3.9600.18398, we get “6.3.9600.18398 (winblue_ltsb.160625-0600)”, so this is what needs to be used in your collection queries in order to have anything show up in your collections.

The resulting query ends up like this

select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name,SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile on SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.FileName = “vmbus.sys” and SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.FileVersion = “6.3.9600.18398 (winblue_ltsb.160625-0600)”

2008 R2 SP1… Dynamic memory first impressions…

I, like many other nerds, have applied SP1 to many of my Win7 and Win 2008 R2 boxes since its proper release to the web (im not/wasnt ball-sy enough to use the leaked OEM versions)

First impressions of Hyper-V dynamic memory are quite good. I have, as expected, freed up a reasonable amount of memory on each of my hyper-V servers, enough so i could run another 5 or 6 virtuals per host – which is quite impressive.

I quite like the feedback you now get in the Hyper-V mmc – with assigned memory, memory demand and memory status…. although a minor thing – it will definately help improve densities and therefore reduce costs in the datacentre.