Manage Server 2008 from 2012 Server Manager

One of the biggest improvements to Windows Server 2012 is the (almost) all encompassing Server Manager. From any 2012 server you can now manage any other 2012 server through WinRM - but if you add a 2008 or 2008 R2 server to Server Manager, you will get a manageability warning of “Online – Verify WinRM 3.0 service is installed, running, and required firewall ports are open“.

To get this working, there are 3 main steps to perform:
Install Windows Management Framework 3.0, Allow remote server management through WinRM (preferred method is via Group Policy), Create firewall rules.

 1. Install Windows Management Framework 3.0 Go and get the appropriate .msu from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34595 Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 WINDOWS6.1-KB2506143-x64.MSU Windows Server 2008 SP2 64-bit versions: WINDOWS6.0-KB2506146-x64.MSU 32-bit versions: WINDOWS6.0-KB2506146-x86.MSU As you can see, there are some slight caveats. 2008 R2 requires SP1 while 2008 requires SP2 to be installed.

2. Allow remote server management through WinRM There are 2 ways you can do this. I would recommend use Group Policy wherever possible, so go to: Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Remote Management (WinRM) > WinRM Service > Allow remote server management through WinRM Set it to enabled and if you want it to listen on all addresses, put a * in IPv4 and IPv6 filter boxes. Alternatively, you can run the command “winrm quickconfig” to enable remote access

3. Create firewall rules Do this again through Group Policy, allowing port 5985.

Error importing drivers into SCCM 2012 SP1

While attempting to resolve what I thought was a malformed driver, I removed the Intel Chipset driver from SCCM. Upon attempting to re-import the driver again I was presented with this error (found in the DriverCatalog log).

“Import failed as \\server\share\driverpath\* is a Reparse Point that SMS does not support via downloads.                 DriverCatalog  06-03-2013 14:24:23”

It turns out to be a problem when the driver source location is hosted on a Server 2012 platform with data De-duplication enabled. After much googling, I found this post on technet.

"please be aware that you can run into issues with using server 2012 de-dupe.  ConfigMgr does not currently support re-parse points, so if you attempt to import a driver package or something else that has a re-parse point in it, it will fail."

One solution is to delete the files from the package source and re-copy, this will remove the re-parse points from the De-duplication database and allow SCCM to import the driver. 

The other is to exclude any directories that are used as replication parents from the data de-dupe schedule. Package source, Driver source and OS installation/updates sources should *not* be de-duped. It's annoying not being able to de-dupe these folders but it's safer than having driver packages suddenly (and randomly) become corrupted.

It's a shame that SCCM 2012 R2 still doesn't support re-parse points as we were enjoying a 71% de-dupe rate. Maybe in the next version Microsoft will fix this problem.

Fingers crossed !