Boot Image Properties are missing after R2 SP1 CU2 Upgrade

Hey guys. Happy to meet you with one of my recent experience again. I am really blessed to work for my client as I get to work on the latest version of the product. So the story goes like this, As soon as CU2 for ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SP1 is released, we started evaluating it and prepared our ConfigMgr infrastructures for the upgrade. The entire upgrade went successfully and started performing tests to ensure the functionality of ConfigMgr only to realize that the customization properties of all boot images are missing.

 As this is kind of common in infrastructure upgrade where the boot images are not updated yet, we updated all our boot images. But still no tabs!!

 We started looking out for other options, but none of them worked. We only had the option of reinstalling the ADK in site server left with us. But I wanna make sure that I took care of everything before doing that. So I created a thread to ask for other technet member's opinion on this.

Drivers tab is missing on Boot Image Properties

 I am glad that I opened that thread and Jason directed me to work around the SMS provider.

(get-wmiobject -class sms_providerLocation -namespace root\sms).machine

Running  above power shell command returned me 2 SMS providers, Where as we only have one SMS provider that sits on the site server itself. Probably the leftovers of previous SMS provider testing.

Now that I realized what needs to be done, I remove the left overs of the second SMS provider and voila!! the tabs are back again.

Hope this helps

S A Delphin

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Did you know that you should breakup with server 2008 R2

 Hey Guys.. I am here with yet another exciting post about ConfigMgr current branch (1511). A month before we decided to install ConfigMgr 1511 in a test environment and evaluate the product to ensure that it suits our PROD infrastructure with all the other services connecting in.

 I was really stumbled when I found out about the depreciating features of ConfigMgr vNext (1511) while I was reading through the features and pre-requisites of it. Looks like we can not use Server 2008 / 2008 R2 as a site server / site system anymore. The support for these OS versions will be removed right after year from the release date of ConfigMgr 1511. This is the same for SQL 2008 R2 as DB as well.

Read more here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt210917.aspx

 But we have all our servers running server 2008 R2 and the only option available to to have ConfigMgr 1511 PROD is to perform a side by side migration from 2012 R2 Sp1 to ConfigMgr 1511 with server 2012 as site systems/site servers. But this is clearly not an option for us since we had a lot of objects to migrate and we really don't wanna mess with how things works now. 1511Since upgrading our PROD environment to ConfigMgr 1511  is one of the milestone for this year, We decided to look at other options to upgrade to 1511 without having to perform a side by side migration.

 Luckily we came up with a plan which does not involve a side by side migration.

This is how we are planning to perform the upgrade from ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SP1 to ConfigMgr 1511.

1. First, we will build a ConfigMgr 1511 infrastructure on windows server 2012 R2
2. Upgrade the existing ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SP1 to ConfigMgr 1511
3. Perform "Migrating to new hardware" steps to migrate the infrastructure.

The above is just the outline of we are thinking and we are developing the plan into action. I will keep you guys posted on how it goes.

Update :  Since ConfigMgr Current Branch now supports in-place upgrade of site servers from 2008 R2 to 2012 R2, you could choose that approach as a simple and safe approach

 S A Delphin

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