Deployment

Software management is not trivial task. Preparing for silent deployment is challenging, and even if you manage to install the application, how to keep it up to date? Chocolatey is package manager for Windows, that can fully automate lifecycle of your software. In this video, I’ll show you how to install Chocolatey, then how to find software, install it and finally keeping it up to date - all coming with free open-source license....

Having software consistently deployed across the fleet of computers is one of the key points that can be automated. If I have a choice (and it makes sense), I will always choose GPO over any other solution because it’s embedded into Active Directory thus not requiring installation, learning and maintenance of additional management tool. MSI – Software Installation One of the main advantages of MSI installers is that in 99% of cases you can just use the “Software Installation” option in GPO, and GPO will take care of the silent installation....

Deploying a new server is always fun! Well, at least the part after ISO download, installation, patching. Having said that, why not create a template so that you jump right into the fun? So we are essentially going to create a preconfigured VHDX file that can be attached to the newly created VM, and it will take you straight to the login screen. What’s needed Windows server or Windows 10 with Hyper-V role and management tools enabled Windows Assessment and Deployment Toolkit (ADK) – I always pick the latest version available, at the moment of writing this – Windows 10, version 1903 – is latest....

Today we are going to inject drivers into the Windows image with the help of built-in tools in Windows. What do you need? Just a few things: Any hardware to which you’d like drivers to be added to Reference computer with the hardware attached to it Drivers Windows image which is going to be deployed I think there’s not much to explain, so let’s analyse the actual process. What we are going to do?...

Drivers – that’s what makes a harmony between hardware and software. Appropriate drivers can make a huge difference between computer’s performance, stability and even temperature. Therefore it’s super important to make sure you’ve got up-to-date files included with your image or Windows installation. We are going to review PNPUTIL tool – the versatile tool for handling drivers within the Windows. Why do you need PNPUTIL? Yes, why bother with some command line tool (PNPUTIL is command line only) when there are dedicated installers and device manager?...