Last week I was at the Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) meetup at Citrix’s Santa Clara office and was having a discussion about Moonshot with Aaron Parker. Aaron is commonly regarded as the master of App-V and MDT, so naturally he was curious to see if I had yet used MDT to deploy the Windows Operating Systems to HP Moonshot. If you’ve not had a change to see Aaron present this content, I highly recommend you watch his Synergy/E2E session or review his content on ‘Hands off my gold image!’

MDT in fact is what I use for all my EUC gold image builds (including Moonshot) as it is a free, quick, and easy way to layer in additional components (such as Adobe apps, VDA, PVS Target Device software, etc.). I’ve covered Moonshot for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop quite a bit and you can review my initial testing with HDX 3D Pro, or my Synergy session slides. I’ve also covered MDT 2013 installation and configuration in past posts, so you can read up on those more here:

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Primer!
Installing and Configuring Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 on Windows Server 2012 R2

We’ll use the Installing and Configuring blog post as a starting point to build the MDT server for Moonshot. In this blog post I will describe all the Moonshot specific tasks that need to be completed in order to use MDT for Windows OS deployment. First, a couple disclaimers…

As I mentioned in my presentation at Citrix Synergy (that I repeated at E2EVC and HP Discover), the officially supported and documented method for OS deployment should be used if you need to open a case with Citrix or HP for assistance. However, for more advanced environments, Moonshot uses PXE boot for installing the OS, so this can be integrated with MDT, SCCM, Altiris, RES Automation Manager or the like. Considering MDT is completely free and has some rather advanced functionality, it has become a personal favorite of mine and many others in the industry. The processes described in this blog post can be adapted to SCCM if, for example, you intend to deploy and manage Persistent HDI using Moonshot. After all, with Persistent HDI, you will need a quick and efficient way of re-imaging the nodes when individuals leave or blow up their desktops (not like that has ever happened!). Below are the official guides from HP for reference:

http://bit.ly/PlX6nA – HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis Setup and Installation Guide
http://bit.ly/1tr7pXG – Operating System Deployment on HP ProLiant Moonshot Server Cartridges User Guide
http://bit.ly/1i7XdtX – HP ConvergedSystem 100 for Hosted Desktops Getting Started Guide
http://bit.ly/1kSsYMX – Moonshot Tools for HP ConvergedSystem100 for Hosted Desktops

Importing the Windows 7 x64 media into MDT

Once the MDT 2013 server has been setup, we’ll import Windows 7 installation media. To do this, I’ll mount the Win7x64 ISO (SW_DVD5_SA_Win_Ent_7w_SP1_64BIT_English_-2_MLF_X17-58882.iso in my example):

With the ISO mounted, I’ll import into MDT by Right Clicking on Operating System and selecting Import Operating System:

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Select Full set of source files and click next:

Type the path to the mounted drive letter (E:\) and click Next:

Since we will be customizing these files, I’ll add ‘Moonshot’ to the end of the Directory name:

Click Next, Next, Finish to complete the wizard. The Win7x64 image is now imported to MDT:

Furthermore, a directory has now been created under ‘C:\DeploymentShare\Operating Systems‘ called ‘Windows 7 x64 Moonshot’ we’ll come back to this in a minute.

Modifying the imported Boot.wim and Install.wim for Moonshot

The official Operating System Deployment guide is quite prescriptive for the customizations necessary to install Windows OS to Moonshot using Windows Deployment Services (WDS). At this point we’ll actually use the same process as described on Page 16, in the section Using the HP MWDP to customize a Windows image for HP Moonshot server cartridge nodes.

Below are modified summary steps from the guide with appropriate changes for MDT.

1. Download the appropriate HP MWDP from:
http://www.hp.com/support/moonshot/1500chassis-software-download
2. Create a temporary folder to store the image files. The examples below use:
C:\imageprep
3. Create a ‘m700’ subfolder and copy the full contents of the Windows Deployment Pack for HP ProLiant m700 server cartridge to the M700 folder so the contents match the following:
C:\imageprep\m700\drivers\
C:\imageprep\m700\scripts\
C:\imageprep\m700\unattend\

4. Navigate to ‘C:\DeploymentShare\Operating Systems\Windows 7 x64 Moonshot\sources’ and copy boot.wim and install.wim:

5. Paste these two files into the ‘C:\imageprep\m700\scripts\’ folder.

6. Open an elevated (Run as administrator) ‘Deployment and Imaging Tools Environment’ command prompt and cd to the scripts folder.

7. Run hpdrvadd.cmd from the scripts folder:

This step modifies the BOOT.WIM and INSTALL.WIM files by adding the NIC drivers, chipset, and SAC. After 5-10 minutes, verify success:

Now, we’ll copy these two files (install.wim and boot.wim) back to the DeploymentShare directory. In the scripts directory, select and copy both files (note, you should notice the date modified timestamp has been updated):

Paste over top of the two files in ‘C:\DeploymentShare\Operating Systems\Windows 7 x64 Moonshot\sources’:

Select Replace the files in the destination to overwrite these files.:

Click Continue twice:

Importing the Moonshot drivers into MDT for LiteTouch WinPE Media

Next, we’ll import the drivers into MDT so they get baked into the LiteTouch image. Right click on Out-of-box Drivers and click Import Drivers:

Type ‘c:\imageprep\m700\drivers’ in the path field and click Next, Next, Finish to close the wizard:

You should now have three drivers listed (in addition to any previously loaded):

Continue to Part 2: Creating MDT Applications and the Moonshot Task Sequence

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, feel free to comment below, message me on twitter or send me an e-mail.

Thanks!
–@youngtech