Powershell – Getting device driver version

Here’s a quick tip to get a list of device driver version installed:

• Open Powershell (as Administrator)
• Execute the following command:
  Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver | select DeviceName, Manufacturer, DriverVersion

After executing the command, you’lll get something like this, where the third column displays the driver version:

Win7 Deploy – Adding NVM Express Support (KB2990941)

Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 2008 R2 SP1 don’t support NVM Express (NVMe) devices that uses the PCI Express (PCIe) bus.
Therefore, when you try to deploy the OS on a machine with this devices, you’ll receive a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

To simply solve this, Microsoft has available an hotfix that adds the native NVMe driver support.

Here’s the download link:
KB2990941 - Update to add native driver support in NVM Express in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

WDS - Injecting VMware VMXNET3 Driver Error

I'm creating a new WDS + MDT infrastructure almost from scratch and I'm using VMware for deployment and image creation.
Because I'm using VMware VMXNET3 for network and VMware ParaVirtual SCSI for storage I needed to inject this 2 drivers on my Windows Deployment Servers (WDS) boot image for installing the created images.

Doing this on MDT when creating the boot images for the litetouch deployment has no issue, but for the boot.wim for installing images (extracted for the sources\boot.wim of Windows DVD) something goes wrong.
For some unknown although the VMware ParaVirtual driver gets easily inject, the VMXNET3 driver don't.
Not really investigated the reason, but has a workaround, follow this easy steps.

So what we're going to do it's to inject the drivers on boot.wim file using DISM:

1. First copy the file from a DVD/ISO (it's located on "...\sources\boot.wim") and copy it to a local drive (ex.: D:\Temp\)


2. Than you'll need to mount the WIM file:
   DISM /Mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\Temp\boot.wim /Index:2 /MountDir:D:\Temp\MountPoint


3. Now, you're ready to inject the VMware VMXNET3 Driver (or any other drivers), you just need to point to the *.inf file:
   DISM /Image:D:\Temp\MountPoint /Add-Driver /Driver:D:\Temp\Drivers\VMwareVMXNET3\vmxnet3ndis6.inf


4. Drivers injected, now unmount and commit changes:
   DISM /Unmount-Image /MountDir:D:\Temp\MountPoint /Commit

And you're done!

Now you just need to publish that boot.wim on your WDS and deploy images.

WDS and VMware Paravirtual SCSI Drivers

On a VMware VDI environment VMware Paravirtual SCSI driver it's recommended as the SCSI controller for your virtual machines.

In my environment the main template it's created using WDS (which also serves the physical machines).
By default the boot.wim (used to boot machines into WDS and deploy reference images) doesn't have the drivers necessary (or up-to-date) for a VMware environment. For example boot.wim doesn't come with the necessary network drivers for VMware VMXNET3 so this example will serve both for network or scsi drivers.

So, to boot up to WDS and be able to deploy successfully a reference image to a VMware virtual machine which is configured with a VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller, follow this steps:

Getting and injecting the drivers

• First of all, get a working virtual machine that already has a paravirtual controller installed and be sure that you have the latest VMware Tools installed
  
• Login to that vm and go to "C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\VMware Tools\"
  
• Copy "pvscsi" folder to your WDS server
  
• Now you just need to open your WDS console and inject the drivers like shown in the video bellow

• And your done.

You can now boot a VM with VMware paravirtual scsi controler.

Just keep in mind that if needed, you'll have to get the drivers from a x86 and a x64 machine.