Adaptiva OneSite Wins Against 1E Nomad Once Again – 35,000 Seats At State Of Illinois

Adaptiva OneSite wins once again. This time it is a 35,000 seat deployment at the State of Illinois. We competed directly against 1E Nomad – and Adaptiva OneSite won hands down.

What we didn’t do to win this deal makes it even more interesting.

We didn’t send out sales guys to hound the customer every day, we didn’t hand out MMS party tickets, we didn’t promise them any “sunshine” at MMS.

In fact, our sales team didn’t even make a phone call to sell our product.

We simply offered a cutting edge product at a fair price, and let the customer do their own comparisons.

We just keep doing what we do

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1E Nomad vs. Adaptiva OneSite

As you probably already know, competition is intense these days between 1E’s Nomad  and Adaptiva’s OneSite products.

As we continue to hand out defeat after defeat to our much bigger and older rivals, things are getting pretty warmed up.

I blogged our win at Australian retailing giant Coles in this blog.

Now we have won against 1E Nomad at the Red Cross Blood Service in Australia, helping them manage  deployments for their fleet of machines spread across the whole continent.

Disclaimer: All copyrights and trademarks are property of their owners and are used here for identification only.

Adaptiva OneSite Scores Another Huge Win At Coles, Australia

Continuing our string of wins against our traditional rivals, Adaptiva’s OneSite product has once again won against 1E’s Nomad product at Coles, Australia.

With 100,000 employees and 2000 stores spread across the continent, Coles are a retail giant, and are known as the Walmart of Australia.

As a retailing giant, Coles faces severe Systems Management challenges that are common to this industry segment, and were looking for a product that would allow them to extend their SCCM capabilities across the WAN to a large number of remote locations.

They ran a thorough evaluation of 1E’s Nomad product against Adaptiva’s OneSite. We participated in a full lab deployment, followed by a production pilot on the LAN, and then a second production pilot across a heavily used production WAN link.

OneSite proved itself with flying colors, and it was greatly satisfying for me to watch our technology coming alive and meeting some pretty severe requirements that Coles’ operational needs generated.

I have blogged the Coles SCCM/MDT Task Sequence WAN scenario here: http://adaptiva.com/blog/?p=83

As we welcome the SCCM team at Coles on board, we’d like to thank them for taking the time to look closely at the actual products – not just marketing literature and sales pitch.

We’d also like to thank our trusted partners Dilignet, who have worked tirelessly to help and support us.

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Adaptiva OneSite - SCCM 2012 Support

There has been a lot of curiosity about our plans for supporting SCCM 2012 in Adaptiva OneSite.

We have so far expressed a general commitment to supporting SCCM 2012 within 90 days of RTM, barring any major late-breaking design or schema changes.

With the release of RC1 on Thursday, it is time to announce our detailed OneSite plans.

Current Features

All OneSite features will continue to work unchanged with SCCM 2012. The underlying schema changes will be detected and handled automatically.

You will be able to install OneSite in under five minutes on an SCCM 2012 Site, from start to finish.

The administrative experience will continue to be as seamless as before. All SCCM objects, new and old, will be available from inside Adaptiva OneSite Workbench, the object explorers will automatically refresh in real time, and you’ll still be able to drag and drop everything everywhere, as long as it makes logical sense.

On To The New Things

Complete support has been added for the new Application Model. An Application Explorer has been provided. As you create, modify, or delete Applications, OneSite will detect your changes in real time, and take appropriate action, as we do today for other types of content: packages, patches, and images.

Applications will automatically download on demand to your branch offices, and they will use OneSite P2P and bandwidth harvesting technologies. All advanced OneSite content management features, compression, byte level differencing, disk space harvesting, automatic cache management, and daisy chaining, will work unchanged for Applications.

You will also be able to pre-stage Applications to any part of your network using OneSite Content Push policies. You’ll simply open the Application Explorer, and drag and drop the desired Application into a Content Push Policy. The selected Application will automatically be added to the Content Push policy, and will be pre-staged to the selected collections, on schedules specified by you.

Packaging

We plan to ship a single common version of OneSite that works transparently for SCCM 2007 and SCCM 2012. It will figure out the differences during installation, and automatically adapt itself depending on what you’re running.

Release Dates

In about a week we’ll start providing SCCM 2012 compatible builds to existing OneSite customers. Over the next few weeks, we’ll gradually extend this delivery to customers who’re already on the waitlist for these builds. In about a month from now, we’ll merge the code branches, and SCCM 2012 support will automatically be included with regular production builds.

At that time, the current 1.3.x series of releases will change to 2.0.x series.

Support

Microsoft’s support for pre-release software can sometimes vary depending on the program through which you’re participating. Our support for OneSite will generally match or exceed your current level of Microsoft support for SCCM 2012.

Series 2.0.x releases will be fully production worthy. If you’re interested in testing SCCM 2012 RC1 in production, we’ll happily support OneSite in production for you.

Adaptiva OneSite Peer to Peer PXE for SCCM – After The Storm

Adaptiva’s simple one-line announcement of OneSite Peer to Peer PXE triggered a storm last month.

Amidst all the craziness, the announcement sent thousands of hits from around the world to my blog.

It also altered the course of several large SCCM deployments, some as far away as Europe and Australia.

Along with all these has come a deluge of proof-of-concept deployments, feedback, feature requests, and a set of fascinating scenarios that people wish to enable using the revolutionary protocol we have created.

In today’s blog I will describe one overwhelmingly requested use case that has emerged as the holy grail for a lot of companies.

The Holy Grail of OSD Scenarios

This is how one admin described their scenario to us:

1. We have an automated build process using SCCM/MDT task sequences
2. It installs the OS, drivers, applications, and integrates with our backend processes
3. It works great, we put in a bare metal machine, and get a fully built production machine out
4. But it works only in the head office – because it needs to download Gigs of data every time
5. We’d like it to work seamlessly worldwide, even over WAN – without changing our build process

People want their SCCM/MDT build process to work anytime, anywhere, and at the same speed as it works in their headquarters, all without building out the enormous amount of server infrastructure that is normally required to support these scenarios.

Is P2P PXE Enough?

As we explored these scenarios, we recognized not only the coolness, but also the enormity of some of these requirements.

Our conclusion was that P2P PXE provides some vital elements of what was needed, but a lot of additional engineering was required to provide the seamless enablement that people were asking for.

Back To The Whiteboards

Having fully defined the use case and identified its detailed requirements, we went back to the whiteboards and carefully crafted the additional superstructure that was required on top of the P2P PXE protocols.

As we developed the code, we also selected a large retail organization to work with. We had already concluded a successful lab POC with them, and they were eager to prove the P2P PXE stack in production, identify any shortcomings, and help validate the product’s new capabilities to make sure they met these severe requirements.

With the release of Version 1.2.86 of OneSite on Friday, after a month of close work with a few carefully selected customers, we’re finally ready with a release that completely enables this demanding scenario.

5 Minutes - 5 Simple Steps

The resulting solution is simple and elegant. With a few simple steps, you’re ready to extend the reach of your OSD build process to all corners of the world.

1. Enable P2P PXE
2. Modify the boot image for standalone use
3. Inject the OneSiteDownloader tool into the boot image
4. Add an action to run OneSiteDownloader in your Task Sequence
5. Use Adaptiva OneSite Content Push to pre-stage your images and packages

The Results

After we wrapped up the remaining pieces, I had the joyful experience of idly watching by, as two experienced SCCM admins expertly navigated their build process, and successfully deployed a production Windows image to a laptop across the WAN, in the middle of a busy workday. OneSite successfully downloaded all boot images, OS images, and packages locally, while the WAN continued to hum along.

There are far reaching implications for how SCCM is deployed, and how it gets used for deploying production builds.

I’d like to once again thank all our customers who provided brilliant inputs and allowed us access to their production networks to deploy and fine tune these technologies.

Jason Sandys is now the Director of Solutions Engineering at Adaptiva

I have great pleasure in announcing that Jason Sandys has joined Adaptiva as our Director of Solutions Engineering.

Jason is a Microsoft MVP for SCCM, and has co-authored the “SCCM 2007 Unleashed” and “SCCM 2012 Unleashed” books.

In addition to technical excellence, Jason brings with him a set of shared values that define us as a company.

Jason will be involved with building, training, motivating, and managing the Solutions Engineering team at Adaptiva. He will also be involved with fostering a culture of ethical professionalism and engineering excellence in the development of Solutions Engineering as one of the core disciplines within the company.

On behalf of my colleagues and all our customers, a very warm welcome aboard!

Adaptiva One Site – Bare Metal OSD Using SCCM With Peer to Peer PXE

 

Once in a while there is an opportunity to present something that feels truly revolutionary. Even though I was involved with the design of the Peer to Peer stack in One Site, and wrote some of the code for it, by the time we were done, I was simply blown away by how beautifully it worked. It took a ton of work, and I’m very pleased to be able to describe it in this blog.

You can also download the actual user guide here: OneSite P2P PXE User Guide

1. About PXE

PXE (Preboot Execution Environment, pronounced as pixie) has been around for ever. It originated as part of Intel’s “Wired for Management” initiative, and the current de facto standard, version 2.1, was published in 1999, jointly by Intel and Systemsoft.

At the time, I worked at Microsoft, as a program manager with the Windows Networking team, and it was really exciting to see, work on, and help manage a lot of new things coming out of Intel in those days.

However, when I look back at many of these things all these years later, they really didn’t work out that well: Wake on LAN, G.723.1/H.323 based IP conferencing, and yes, PXE.

Even though all these protocols were carefully designed, reused a lot of work that had been done at the standards bodies, and were vetted repeatedly, the kind of enterprise thinking that permeates these companies today wasn’t as prevalent at the time. It is really an irony that I have wandered into the candy store a second time and been involved in alleviating the shortcomings of all three of these protocols.

Challenges of deploying PXE on large distributed enterprise-scale networks are well known to all of us. I’ll enumerate them quickly and we’ll move on to P2P PXE:

• Deploying the server infrastructure required for PXE and TFTP
• Network configuration changes (IP helpers) required to routers
• DHCP server changes required, specially for those companies that run their DHCP servers on Cisco

2. Benefits of Peer to Peer PXE

These are exactly the reverse of the deployment challenges I listed above. This is not a coincidence, because we designed our Peer to Peer PXE protocol to exactly remove the shortfalls that exist in the current PXE protocol.

• No servers or server roles are required
• No router changes are required
• No DHCP server configuration changes are required

There is nothing to install, or configure, in any of your branch offices, period.

All you have to do is:

• Install one copy of Microsoft’s WAIK toolkit – a free download from here: WAIK Download
• In the Adaptiva Workbench, select the collections where you want PXE
• Click the “Enable” button in the Adaptiva Workbench

Peer to Peer PXE is automatically enabled on all machines that belong to the selected collections – all within the next 1-2 minutes! What you’ll have is a completely elastic and self healing PXE infrastructure that continues to function, no matter how many machines go up or down, come online or go offline, break, or get fixed, and then get broken again.

3. Under the Covers

There are two core protocols that are required for a machine to boot its neighbor using PXE:

• PXE Server
• TFTP Server

Brutally efficient implementations of both these protocols are built into every One Site client.

When you download and install the WAIK toolkit, One Site server extracts the following seven tools, and packages them into an “Adaptiva WAIK Package”, which is then automatically deployed to all the required client machines – using the Peer to Peer protocols, and the WAN bandwidth management protocols that One Site is getting known for.

• abortpxe.com
• bcdedit.exe
• boot.sdi
• bootmgr.exe
• pxeboot.com
• pxeboot.n12
• wgl4_boot.ttf

The clients now have everything they need in order to PXE boot fellow machines. One Site’s Peer to Peer protocols take care of the rest.

4. The Real Mccoy

Seeing is believing, so here is a complete step by step walkthrough, including screenshots.

5. Open the One Site Peer to Peer PXE Perspective

To start using Peer to Peer PXE, you must first open the “Peer to Peer PXE Perspective”, which contains UI for enabling and using Peer to Peer PXE.

1. Open the “Home” perspective by clicking on the “Home” icon in the toolbar, as shown below.

2. Open the Peer to Peer PXE perspective by double-clicking the item named: “One Site - Peer to Peer PXE Perspective”, as shown above

3. This will open the Peer to Peer PXE perspective, which is displayed below:

6. Enable Peer to Peer PXE

Enabling Peer to Peer PXE is straightforward and takes only a few moments.

1. Open the “P2P PXE Settings” editor by clicking the “Edit P2P PXE Policy Settings” item in the “P2P PXE Task Navigator”

2. This will open the editor window, which is shown below

3. Download the “Windows Automated Installation Kit”, or WAIK, from Microsoft’s web site, and install it on the Adaptiva Server machine

4. Specify the path of the installation folder in the “WAIK location” field of the editor

5. Check the box “Enable Unknown computer Support” if you’ll be supporting unknown computers in future

6. Drag and drop one or more SCCM collections into the “Target collections” field

7. Click on the “Enable” button

7. Watch As It Happens

At this point, you’ve done everything that you need to do. Just sit back and watch magic happen.

8. Finally, One Site PXE Boots a Machine

Here is a VM booting up using Adaptiva One Site Peer to Peer PXE.

Remember, P2P PXE is included with your basic One Site license – there are no additional licensing costs, and no consulting services that need to be purchased.