Using Systems Management Server to Deploy Windows 2000
Using Systems Management Server to Deploy Windows 2000 |
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The SMS status message that reports the progress of the upgrade at each computer can also be used to report the progress of the Windows 2000 deployment as a whole. The number of computers ready to be upgraded, those successfully upgraded, and the locations of failures can all be reported. You can then intervene where any problems have occurred.
SMS 2.0 includes a powerful System Status subsystem that allows you to readily monitor the distribution. The SMS Administrator console includes a System Status node where you can obtain summary and detailed results from the System Status subsystem. There is an Advertisement Status subnode that allows you to obtain the status of the advertisements.
When you select Advertisement Status under System Status in the SMS Administrator console, you can view the following:
An example of this information is shown in Figure 14.10. At this level there are no status messages to be queried.
Figure 14.10 The Status of All Advertisements
Below the advertisement status for all advertisements you can select each advertisement. At this level, you can view the following:
Figure 14.11 shows this type of status. At this level, there are no status messages to be queried.
Figure 14.11 The Status of the Windows 2000 Advertisement
At the advertisement status level, you can select each site. From the Action menu, point to Show Messages, and then click All to see the status messages for the advertisement at this site. The following sequence of messages is typical:
The message indicates why this has occurred. Common reasons are that the user cancelled the program or otherwise forced it to stop, or the client computer did not have enough disk space.
At this point the SMS part of the upgrade is done. This corresponds with the end of the first phase of the Windows 2000 Setup (the file upgrade phase).
At this point the Windows 2000 Setup is complete. The last two phases (text mode and GUI setup) have ended, and the computer is ready for the user to log on.
You might want to produce a report of the advertisement status, either for easy reference or to address your own specific requirements. You can perform queries of the SMS advertisement status subsystem and incorporate the responses in the reporting tool of your choice, as is done with other SMS reporting functions. Table 14.2 lists the relevant class and the category of status information that can be found in the class.
Table 14.2 Advertisement Status Class
| Class | Status Information |
|---|---|
| SMS_AdvertisementStatusSummarizer | Displays detailed advertisement status information grouped by site code. Maps to the advertisement items beneath Advertisement Status in the SMS Administrator console. |
For more information about writing reports based on the data SMS collects, see the Microsoft Systems Management Server Technical Details link on the Web Resources page at http://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources.
For the Windows 2000 advertisement status reporting, you will want reports such as the following:
This report is a comparison of computers that are currently in the relevant collection but do not have a 10002 status message. If the program was advertised before the report, this report will indicate the computers that have not been used lately or that are not properly connected to the network or the SMS infrastructure.
This report is a comparison of computers that have a 10002 status message but do not have a 10005 status message. If the program was assigned to run before the report, this report will indicate the computers that have not been used since the advertisement was first advertised or that have become disconnected from the network or the SMS infrastructure. If the program was not assigned, this report will also include computers where the users have chosen not to upgrade yet.
This report is a comparison of computers that have 10005 status messages but not 10009 status messages. These are likely to be computers where the user has cancelled the upgrade or the computers did not have enough disk space. Parsing the 10007 message description gives more details. If either problem is common, then a report of those specific computers might be appropriate.
There is a remote possibility that some computers will fail in such a way that neither 10007 or 10009 status messages will be received. To take that possibility into account, you can have a report of computers with 10005 messages but not 10008 or 10009 messages. For users who have canceled the upgrade, an e-mail reminding them of the importance of the upgrade might be sufficient to resolve the problem. Or, the program can be assigned so that it must happen at a specific time. For other problems, manual intervention might be required (using the SMS remote tools might be sufficient).
This report is a comparison of computers that have 10009 status messages but not 13126 status messages. These are likely to be computers where the upgrade started but then stopped for some reason. If you run the report during a period of mass upgrades, such as over a weekend, this report can help you identify problems that you can manually correct before the user is aware of them. However, it usually takes an hour or more for the upgrade to progress from the time at which the 10009 message is generated to the point at which the 13126 message is generated.
Note
SMS 2.0 SP2 includes a fix to the package status reporting system so that the 13126 message is replaced with a 10009 message, which is the correct behavior. The messages are also generated more reliably, and the 10009 message has a meaningful message text, whereas the 13126 message has no text. Therefore, it is recommended that you deploy SMS 2.0 SP2 before deploying Windows 2000 with SMS. After SP2 has been deployed, the report logic will have to distinguish between the two 10009 messages using the message text.
This report is a count of 13126 status messages spread over time. This can be useful for monitoring the status of the project overall.
