IT Certification and Training Blog

Microsoft Windows 7 Tips and Tricks | Drive Letters

By Val Bakh

2.4.1 Drive Letters (part 1)

Disk drives are referred to by using alphabet letters. Drives A and B were commonly used for floppy disk drives, which are now ancient history; virtually no new computers have them anymore. Now drive C is usually the first drive on almost any computer. But what exactly is drive C?

Let’s start with the basic terminology. The device that you install in or connect to your computer is a hard disk drive, or simply a hard disk. It is also often called a physical disk. Before a hard disk can store your data, you must prepare it. You need to initialize the disk, create one or more logical containers, and format them for a specific file system. Although these are all non-trivial steps—each step requires a certain degree of consideration and planning—we’ll skip most of the details and focus on only what is relevant to the main topic. Those logical containers that you create on a disk have many names: partitions, drives, logical drives, volumes—to name a few. Technically, not all of these terms mean exactly the same thing, but most people use them as if they did. Let’s choose one—volume—and stick to it throughout this discussion. So a volume is “the thing” that you assign a drive letter to.

Sometimes, Microsoft has an interesting way of naming things. In Microsoft terminology, a system volume is an active disk volume from which a computer boots. Consequently, the system volume hosts boot files. They usually include some sort of boot manager, which is a program that presents one or more boot menus and loads an operating system. A boot volume is a disk volume that hosts an operating system; it is the volume that you specify during an installation when you are prompted to indicate where you want the operating system to be installed. These two theoretical concepts—a system volume and a boot volume—can both be the same disk volume or can be two separate volumes; generally, it’s up to you how to set up a disk and install an operating system.

In the olden days, installing Windows on a blank computer required substantial preparatory work and could easily turn into a real adventure if you were not properly prepared. Starting with Windows NT, installation CDs became bootable and things got a little easier. Windows Vista came on a bootable DVD with its own mini starter operating system (WinPE) and with almost no questions left for you to answer during a typical installation. Although those Windows versions were generations apart, they had one thing in common: unless you specifically wanted to split your installation into multiple volumes, the operating system, by default, was quite happy to live on a single volume, which combined the functions of a system volume and a boot volume. If you wanted to have multiple instances of Windows on the same computer, you needed to create a separate boot volume for each instance. Each installation knew its boot volume’s drive letter, and usually, each volume’s drive letter remained the same, regardless of which instance of Windows you booted into.

Windows 7 installs easier and faster than even Windows Vista, and on the surface, everything appears to be almost the same. However, there is one important difference: when left alone, Windows 7 will always try to install itself on a boot volume that is separate from the computer’s system volume. And another thing that sets Windows 7 and Windows Vista apart from all earlier versions of Windows is that, whenever possible, they both grab the letter C for the boot volume; that is, of course, unless you know how to trick them.

First, let’s try the classic approach: insert a Windows 7 DVD, and start the computer. It boots into WinPE, and all you have to do is click Install now. If the computer’s hard disk is blank or if it contains a sufficient amount of unallocated space and you select it as the destination for the installation, you end up with two new partitions. One is a 100-MB hidden system volume; it contains a boot configuration data (BCD) store, a boot manager, and a recovery environment (WinRE). The second partition is a regular boot volume—a C drive with a Windows 7 installation.

There are a couple of reasons for this new configuration. First of all, the practice of putting a system volume and a boot volume on separate partitions is tried and true; some of you may have been manually partitioning your computer’s hard disk in a similar manner for ages. This approach is rather convenient, especially in a lab environment, where hosting several installations on the same computer in a multi-boot configuration is not uncommon. Keeping the system volume separate from all of the boot volumes gives you the flexibility to do whatever you need to do with one installation without messing up any other installations and without rendering the entire computer unbootable. Outside the lab, in real life, where people usually have only one installation of Windows per computer, it is somewhat comforting to know that if the only instance of Windows on your computer no longer boots properly, you can press F8 on the keyboard at startup, select Repair Your Computer from the Advanced Boot Options menu, and try to fix the problem by using a few command-line tools that are available in WinRE. Or if nothing else helps, you at least can restore a bare-metal recovery backup that you have been keeping on an external USB hard disk for just that sort of occasion. And one more reason for keeping the system and boot volumes separate is that a separate system volume is required to support BitLocker drive encryption. BitLocker keeps your data on the boot volume confidential, but it needs an unencrypted space to start the computer and unlock the boot volume for you once you have proven that it’s really you.

So far, we’ve covered the basics. The next time, we’ll try a few tricks.

MS Windows 7 Tips and Tricks | Using ImageX

By Val Bakh

2.3.3 Using ImageX
ImageX is a command-line tool that can create, apply, and manage WIM images. Three architecture-specific versions of ImageX—for 32-bit computers (x86), for regular 64-bit computers (x64 or amd64), and for Itanium-based computers (ia64)—are available in Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). In previous blog posts, we have discussed how you can use ImageX to capture a generalized image of a Windows 7 installation on a reference computer. Now let’s talk about deploying that image to a target computer.

Windows deployment in an enterprise environment is an enormous subject. Depending on your goals, the scale of the deployment, and the available resources, there are too many methods and technologies to even mention in a short Tips & Tricks article. Therefore, we’ll focus on only a few details of the main underlying process.

Whichever way you look at it, ultimately, installing Windows 7 always boils down to applying a WIM image to a destination disk volume on a target computer. A standard WIM image of Windows 7 is packaged in a file named install.wim, which is located in the \sources folder on a Windows 7 installation DVD. By generalizing and then capturing a custom installation of Windows 7 on a reference computer, you can create a custom WIM image. If you want an automated deployment, you can prepare all the necessary settings and instructions in an answer file and initiate an installation by running the Setup.exe application with appropriate parameters from a command line.

To better illustrate the deployment mechanics, we’ll go through a manual process. Suppose you have a single custom WIM image in a file named Custom.wim, which is located on a network share, on a USB flash drive (UFD), or anywhere else where a target computer can access it. First, boot the target computer into WinPE and open a Command Prompt window. Then use the Diskpart command-line tool to create and format a system volume, a boot volume, and any additional volumes if you need them. Assign drive letters to the volumes, and mark the system volume as active. The drive letters can be arbitrary; when Windows 7 starts, it will remove the drive letter from the system volume, assign the letter C to the boot volume, and assign letters in alphabetical order, starting with D, to the other volumes if you created them. If you need network access (ImageX and the WIM image that you need to install might be on another computer), run the following commands:

Wpeinit
net use DriveLetter: \\ServerName\ShareName /user:Domain\UserName password

The first command will initialize the network, and the second command will map a drive letter to a network share. WinPE has never asked you for any credentials, and your computer currently does not belong to any domains. Therefore, you need to provide an appropriate user name and password to access the share.

Suppose the system volume is currently C and the boot volume is D. Also suppose that ImageX is available on the Z drive and the Custom.wim file resides on the Y drive. To install the WIM image on the boot volume, run the following command:

z:\imagex /apply y:\custom.wim 1 d:

The 1 in the command is the index of the WIM image. Generally, a .wim file can contain multiple images. Each image in the file is assigned an index, which is simply an ordinal number. The index in the command is 1 because we agreed earlier that the Custom.wim file contains a single image. If you don’t know what is inside a .wim file, you can find out which images it contains and locate their indexes by using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool. You can run the following command directly from the currently open Command Prompt window in WinPE:

dism /get-wiminfo /wimfile:WIMFilePath\WIMFileName.wim

After you have installed the image on the boot volume, you need to configure the system volume so that the computer can boot from it. All the necessary code is available in the \Windows\system32\config folder in the Windows 7 image that you have just installed on the boot volume, which is currently the D drive. To configure the system volume, run the following command:

bcdboot d:\windows

If you have created any additional volumes, now may be the time to populate them with something. Of course, you can always copy the data later, when you are already running Windows 7. But in some situations, you may want to have that data already in place when Windows 7 starts for the first time. Depending on what you want to put on those volumes, you can Xcopy the necessary data from wherever it resides at the moment or you can apply additional WIM images if the data is stored in WIM images. A WIM image is just a nicely packaged copy of a disk volume. So it doesn’t always have to be a captured installation of Windows 7; it can be just about anything.

Finally, reboot the computer, and after a few minutes of initialization, the new Windows 7 instance will be ready for your first logon.

Doesn’t this deployment process remind you of something? Like restoring a backup, maybe? Starting with a blank computer and ending up with a fully functional installation and, perhaps, even with additional data? What if you captured everything from a normal, properly configured and functioning computer and kept it someplace safe in case the computer at some point becomes nonfunctional or otherwise undergoes an undesirable change? Although the native backup application in Windows 7 has regained some of the features that were mysteriously missing from Windows Vista, it is still much too automated and not very flexible. And the backups are so huge…. And there are so many pesky details to remember about how, when, and where they can be made, maintained, and restored….

Although ImageX is not intended as a substitute for a backup/restore application, in some situations it might be very convenient to use it exactly for that purpose. WIM images can be half the size of the corresponding backups produced by using Windows Backup. WIM images can be cut into pieces small enough to fit onto DVDs or even CDs. WIM images can be mounted to an active file system and can be reviewed and even manipulated in Windows Explorer. WIM images can be easily captured and just as easily restored to a new hard disk and even to a different computer. You get the picture….

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MS Windows 7 Tips and Tricks | Activation and Custom Image Deployment

By Val Bakh

2.3.2 Activation and Custom Image Deployment
How does activation fit in with a custom image-based deployment? It depends on the activation method you want to use.

If you have only retail product keys, your options are rather limited: you can either provide a separate product key directly to each end user or assign the keys to the target computers by using a special administrative tool named Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT). The most recent version, VAMT 2.0, supports retail product keys and is available at Microsoft Download Center as a stand-alone download.

In an earlier section of Tips and Tricks, we mentioned two volume-licensing (VL) models: KMS and MAK. If you are already using KMS on your corporate network, activation is a snap. As long as you are deploying a VL edition of Windows 7, you don’t need to do anything at all. As soon as the deployment is complete and a target computer is started for the first time, the computer will be automatically activated by one of your KMS hosts.

If you decide to use MAK activation and you have an appropriate MAK key, you have a couple of options. One option is similar to the earlier mentioned situation with retail keys; you can assign the MAK to target computers by using VAMT. The other option is to assign the MAK to the original installation on the reference computer. Although Sysprep, by default, resets the activation status, the MAK will remain in the image. When the image is deployed to a target computer and the computer is then started for the first time, the operating system will be automatically activated in 72 hours over the Internet. Or the user of the target computer can manually activate it right away.

And in conclusion, here are a few useful facts about the Windows 7 version of Sysprep:

•    If you run the sysprep /generalize /oobe command from within an activated instance of Windows 7, the activation status is reset and the installation returns to a 30-day grace period.
•    You can successfully run this command in the same instance of Windows 7 only up to three times. On the fourth time, this command returns an error.
•    If a retail product key has been loaded, this command removes it.
•    If a MAK key has been loaded, this command does not remove it.
•    You can create an answer file that instructs Sysprep not to reset the activation status, and you can specify the answer file when you run Sysprep. If you do so on an activated installation, the resulting generalized image remains activated. However, if you deploy that image to another computer (physical or virtual), the activation will be lost.

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Microsoft is Increasing Prices on Certification Exams

By Amy Haigh

If you are planning to take a Microsoft certification exam in the near future, you may want to book your exam, or at least purchase an exam voucher, before the end of June. On July 1, 2011, the prices for many of Microsoft’s most popular certification exams will increase for the first time in nine years. Certifications to be affected include MCTS, MCITP, MCSA, MCSE, and MCDBA, and Boson offers ExSim-Max Practice Exams for each of these certifications. In the United States, the price for most exams will increase from $125 to $150 for regular examinees. For high school and college students, the price for most exams will increase from $60 to $83. Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) will receive a 50% discount on all exams. For Microsoft’s announcement and a FAQ about the new pricing structure, see the New Prices for Microsoft Certifications Exams Web page.

Testing centers will honor exam vouchers purchased by June 30, provided that you take the exam by the voucher’s expiration date. And Microsoft is promoting another option to lock in a further discount on the current $125 exam price. If you purchase a Microsoft Certification Pack, which gives you discounts for purchasing multiple exams at a time, and take one exam by June 30, you will have until December 31, 2011, to take the other exams in your Certification Pack. Even if you must rush to take your first exam by June 30, the Certification Packs include one free retake per exam, so it might be worth purchasing a Certification Pack even if you don’t feel completely prepared right now. For information on exam price discounts, see Microsoft’s Special Offers page.

And remember, to ensure that you are indeed prepared to take your Microsoft exams before or after June 30, check out Boson’s ExSim-Max Practice Exams for Microsoft certification exams. Boson’s No Pass, No Pay ExSim-Max guarantee has you covered if you fail the Microsoft exam within six months of purchasing the corresponding ExSim-Max product.

 

Photo by Steve Snodgrass on Flickr

MS Windows 7 Tips and Tricks | Deployment Images & Activation

By Val Bakh

2.3.1 Deployment images
Compared to installing earlier versions of Windows, installing Windows 7 on your home computer is almost a breeze, especially if the computer is new and you don’t need to worry about preserving your data or the applications that you’ve been using with an older operating system. Just insert the Windows 7 installation DVD that you have purchased, click Install Now, answer a few simple prompts, and less than half an hour later, it’s ready to go. But if you are an IT pro and you need to deploy Windows 7 to dozens or, perhaps, even hundreds of computers, it becomes a bit more complicated. Even if all the installations were the same and all target computers were identical, their sheer number would make at-home-style, individual installations impractical. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could install and configure everything on just one computer and then clone the installation to the rest?

Before Windows Vista, disk cloning, or imaging, methods did not provide much flexibility. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. Now you can create logical images in the Windows Imaging (WIM) format. A WIM image corresponds to a disk volume, and a single .wim file can contain multiple images. WIM images are everything that sector-based images were not: they are hardware-independent; are only about half the size of the original data; do not destroy existing data on target volumes; can be deployed to volumes of any type and size, provided there is enough free space on the target volume; and can be modified offline. Now, deploying Windows 7 to a large number of target computers is not as daunting a task as it used to be with Windows XP. So how does it work?

Since we are now talking about an enterprise environment, we can safely assume you are not restricted to a single blank computer, as often would be the case for a regular home user. Suppose you have a personal workstation with Windows 7 up and running and connected to the Internet. Go to Microsoft Download Center, find and download Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7, and install it on your workstation. WAIK contains a lot of tools and resources, but for now we are interested in only one of them: ImageX is a command-line tool that can capture and apply WIM images. Find it, and copy it to a USB flash drive (UFD) or any other place where you can easily access it.

WAIK includes three versions of ImageX: one for 32-bit computers (x86), one for regular 64-bit computers (x64, sometimes also known as amd64), and one for Itanium-based computers (ia64). You will find all three versions of ImageX in the architecture-specific subfolders of the \Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools folder on your workstation. Which version should you use? Obviously, if all your computers have 32-bit hardware, you can use only the 32-bit version. But nowadays, most computers have 64-bit hardware. If that is what you work with, you will be better off with the 64-bit version of ImageX, even if the editions of Windows 7 that you need to deploy are 32-bit. This is because 64-bit software runs a lot faster than 32-bit software. So why would you want to spend an hour to capture an installation image if you can do it in less than half of that time?

To capture and deploy WIM images, you’ll need to run ImageX from within Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). WinPE is a starter operating system that you can boot from a CD, DVD, or UFD and run entirely from RAM, without installing it on the computer’s hard disk. The version of WinPE that is available on a Windows 7 installation DVD is 32-bit, even if the DVD includes 64-bit editions of Windows 7. A 64-bit version of WinPE is available on a Windows Server 2008 R2 installation DVD, or you can create a custom version of WinPE by using WAIK and burn it to a CD.

Now that you have dealt with all the preliminaries, the real work is relatively easy.

Step one: Install Windows 7 on a computer that you want to use as a reference—we’ll call it a reference computer—install whatever applications the end users will need, and configure the appropriate non-user-specific settings for everything that needs to be configured, except for domain membership. Don’t join the computer to any domains; leave it as a stand-alone computer.

Step two: Open a Command Prompt window as an administrator, change to the \Windows\system32\sysprep folder, and run the following command:

sysprep /generalize /oobe

This command will prepare the installation for duplication. Oobe stands for out-of-box experience, which is another term for the Windows Welcome phase of the startup process of a new installation. The /generalize option will remove all the settings that are specific to the reference computer. When the command completes, the computer will automatically shut itself down.

Step three: Boot the reference computer into WinPE, and run ImageX with the /capture option. You can find all the necessary command-line options for ImageX in the ImageX Technical Reference. ImageX will capture the image of the specified volume into a .wim file. You can save the file to any suitable location: another volume on a local hard disk on the reference computer, a UFD, or a network share on a file server.

Now you have a WIM image of the requisite custom installation of Windows 7. How do you deploy it to target computers? We’ll talk about some interesting details of this process later, in another installment of our Tips and Tricks. For now, we’ll just mention the general idea. One possibility is running Windows Setup from a command-line and specifying the custom image that you have just created. Another method is running ImageX with the /apply option. In the latter case, you’ll need to first create and appropriately configure a system volume and a boot volume on each target computer.

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Practice Exam for Cisco CCNA Voice Certification Available at Boson

Press Release: Boson introduces a new ExSim-Max^™ practice exam for the Cisco^® 640-461 (ICOMM) v8.0 certification exam. The 640-461 (ICOMM) exam is the core requirement for the CCNA® Voice certification. ExSim-Max practice exams are available at www.boson.com.


NASHVILLE, TN, April 25, 2011 — Boson Software, LLC, the leading provider of practice exams for Cisco® certifications, is proud to introduce ExSim-Max™ for Cisco 640-461 (ICOMM). ExSim-Max for Cisco 640-461 covers the concepts tested on Cisco’s ICOMM exam, which tests a candidate's knowledge of the architecture, components, functionalities, and features of Cisco Unified Communications solutions.

Cisco recently announced revisions to its Voice Certification track, which is dedicated to building knowledge and validating skills for Cisco Voice and Unified Communications IT professionals. The Cisco CCNA Voice certification has been enhanced to reflect the convergence of data and voice on the network. According to Learning @ Cisco, "Cisco’s leading certification for professionals working with Unified Communications applications across business, government, service provider, and consumer segments provides skills development training for mainstream IT professionals." Cisco's new 640-461 (ICOMM) exam is the required exam for the CCNA Voice certification.

ExSim-Max for Cisco 640-461 includes comprehensive explanations written and developed by Boson’s team of subject-matter experts, and only the most authoritative sources are referenced. ExSim-Max simulates the level of difficulty, question types and item distribution of the certification exam to prepare candidates for the full exam experience. With ExSim-Max, certification candidates will know they are ready to pass. The team at Boson states, "If you can pass the ExSim-Max exam, you can pass the real exam on the first try." Boson is so confident in the quality of the ExSim-Max product that they back up the statement with a No Pass, No Pay ExSim-Max Guarantee.

Boson ExSim-Max practice exams and NetSim^™ network simulators are available at www.boson.com. For more information, call (877) 333-EXAM.

Boson Software, LLC provides top-quality learning solutions for IT professionals seeking certification. Boson offers ExSim-Max practice exams and the NetSim network simulator. Boson’s products ensure that IT professionals have the tools they need to not only pass the exams, but to help learn the material. Boson’s learning solutions are used worldwide by individuals, businesses, academic institutions and government entities. Through its affiliate, Boson Training^®, Boson offers Instructor-Led Training for Cisco technologies and for security technologies, including the EC Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker^™ program. Boson is headquartered in Nashville, Tenn. and also has offices in Tampa, Fla.

How To | Topology and Configs in Boson NetSim 8

By Brian Scheibe

I recently discussed why it’s helpful to be able to create your own lab packs using the Lab Compiler included in Boson's NetSim network simulator software. Lab packs include topology files (*.top), lab documents (*.xps), loading configuration files (*.nwc), and grading configuration files (*.nwc). If you’ve created your own lab pack and want to import the files into NetSim, simply select the Custom Lab Packs tab and then click Lab > Import Lab Pack from the Menu Bar. Sometimes, however, you won’t need to include the individual topology and loading configuration files as a part of a lab pack. The good news is that you can still use them in NetSim.

You can easily open individual topology files, whether they’re ones you created yourself, imported or received from a colleague, in NetSim. Then you can apply the loading configuration files to the devices in the topology.

To open a topology in NetSim 8, click the NetMap tab, click NetMap on the Menu Bar, and then click Open Topology. In the resulting dialog box, select a *.top file and click Open. This will enable you to modify the topology in the NetMap window. The topology will not be applied to devices until you click Apply Selected Topology on the NetMap menu. Alternatively, you can click Open and Apply Selected Topology, and the topology file you select in the resulting dialog box will automatically be applied to the devices in the NetMap.

Once the topology is loaded, if you’ve created loading configuration files, you do not have to configure the devices manually after applying the topology. Instead, you can apply the configuration files by clicking Console > Load Multi-Device Config. The supported file extension is *.nwc. Note that if you haven’t previously loaded a lab or a topology, this option will be unavailable.

Now that your topology and configurations are loaded, you’re ready to start practicing different configurations with the devices in your topology.

Download a NetSim network simulator demo.

 

Related blog articles

• Why create your own lab packs in Boson NetSim?
• Cisco Network Simulator: Can it be used in a classroom? (Part 1 of 3)
• Cisco Network Simulator: Can it be used in a classroom? (Part 2 of 3)
• Cisco Network Simulator: Can it be used in a classroom? (Part 3 of 3)

Microsoft Windows 7 Tips and Tricks | Activation Part 2

By Val Bakh

2.2.2 A product key in an answer file

Suppose you have a custom WIM image of Windows 7 Enterprise, and you have a Multiple Activation Key (MAK). How can you assign the MAK to all target computers? Going around and personally typing in the MAK on each computer would be so-o-o uncool! You can specify the MAK in an answer file and use the answer file for the deployment.

How answer files work is a long and separate story, perhaps for some other time. For now, we’ll just say that an answer file is an optional specially formatted XML file with the settings that Windows 7 Setup applies during an installation. The setup process consists of phases that are called configuration passes, and an answer file includes sections that correspond to the passes. A setting provided in an answer file is applied during the configuration pass that corresponds to the section in which the setting is provided. Settings are not supposed to be placed in sections at random. For an answer file to be valid, each supported setting should be provided in the correct place.

There are two places—actually, they are XML elements—in an answer file where a product key can be specified:

• Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup\ProductKey
•  Microsoft-Windows-Setup\UserData\ProductKey\Key

The first element should be placed in the Specialize section of an answer, and the MAK provided in that element is used to activate the installation on each target computer. When the installation is complete and the computer is restarted, Windows 7 will include the specified MAK and will attempt to automatically activate itself in 72 hours, unless the computer’s end user manually activates the installation earlier.

So if the problem has been solved, then what is the other element for? The second element can be specified in the WindowsPE section; its purpose is to identify the image that is to be installed. A WIM file can contain multiple installation images of different editions of Windows 7. Retail product keys are edition-specific; for example, a retail key for Windows 7 Home Premium cannot activate Windows 7 Professional and vice versa. Hence, by providing a key for a specific edition, you can instruct Setup to install the edition that corresponds to the key. However, the key specified in the WindowsPE section is not used to activate the installation. Moreover, unlike retail product keys, MAKs are a lot less selective when it comes to editions; the same MAK is good for any VL edition of Windows 7. So there are better ways to identify an installation image. For example, you can specify the correct image by using its number, name, or description in the following element:

Microsoft-Windows-Setup\ImageInstall\OSImage\InstallFrom\MetaData

This element can be specified only in the WindowsPE section because Setup selects an image to install during the WindowsPE configuration pass.

 

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< Part 1

Changes to the CCNA Voice Certification Exam

By James Hanback

You've spent endless nights poring over CCNA Voice IT certification training guides, answering CCNA Voice practice questions, and searching—perhaps in vain—for a CCNA Voice lab simulation environment where you can get your hands on a shiny used Cisco Unified Communications 500 (UC500) that you can use to practice everything that you memorized from study guide screen shots and CCNA practice exam hearsay. Thinking you're all primed to obtain your latest Cisco certification, you sit for the CCNA Voice exam and, to your horror, discover that what you studied for is yesterday's news, cold bath water, stale bread, or pick your own metaphor. The rumors of the death of the UC500 topic in the CCNA Voice exam have not been exaggerated at all.

The previous CCNA Voice exam, 640-460, tested your knowledge about the concepts and configuration of small Voice over IP (VoIP) networks, the kind you're most likely to deploy in a small business or medium-sized business. Therefore, the main focus of the exam was the deployment, configuration, and maintenance of products like Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express (CME) for call management, Cisco Unity Express (CUE) for voice messaging, and the UC500 as an all-in-one solution that included that handy graphical user interface (GUI) known as Cisco Configuration Assistant (CCA).

The CCNA Voice 640-461 exam, on the other hand, switches the focus to a larger scale VoIP network. Make no mistake, you still need to know how to administer CME, but you also need to know how to deploy, configure, and maintain the big boys.

Know Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM)

UCM is the big brother of the CME call processing platform. The previous Voice exam tested mainly over administering CME by using the command-line interface (CLI). For 640-461, be sure you understand how and where to configure user accounts, enable specific features, and generate reports by using the GUI as well. You cannot issue a show running-config there.

Know Cisco Unity Connection

Unity Connection is the voice messaging component of the enterprise-level Cisco VoIP network. Make sure you know how to add users to and enable features of Unity Connection. Additionally, you should understand the protocols and methods Unity Connection uses to communicate with other products in the VoIP environment.

Know Cisco Unified Presence (CUP)

CUP is the diplomat of the enterprise VoIP network, the component that gets all the other VoIP components talking to each other and to third party applications. You should know what CUP does and how it does it. There's also the client side of CUP, which is known as Cisco Unified Personal Communicator. Personal Communicator is software that enables an end user to place and receive calls from a workstation. You should familiarize yourself with deploying Personal Communicator and how it works with both CUP and UCM.

Know the VoIP Basics

Although you probably won't find yourself needing to understand all the VoIP background information that you needed for the previous exam, you do still need to know some of the basics about how a VoIP network operates. For example, you should understand voice network protocols, call quality, and call signaling.

Know How to Troubleshoot

The 640-461 exam focuses on administrative and support roles. Therefore, you should understand the process of troubleshooting a VoIP network. You should also be familiar with common problems that you could encounter as a result of the misconfiguration of Cisco Unified Communications components, not to mention the solutions to those problems.

In the end, you have not completely wasted your time if you've studied CCNA Voice 640-460 materials to prepare for the 640-461 exam. However, you could find yourself struggling with exam questions that are related to UCM, Unity Connection, and CUP if you have no experience administering those products.

 

Microsoft Windows 7 Tips and Tricks | Activation Part 1

By Val Bakh

2.2 Activation

2.2.1 Volume Activation

Each installation of Windows 7 must be activated. It is a legal requirement for ensuring that an instance of the operating system is legitimate. There is a 30-day initial grace period, during which you can make up your mind. If you are using Windows 7 for evaluation, testing, or software development and you need to frequently reinstall it and start afresh, you can extend the grace period up to three times by running the following command:

slmgr –rearm

But once you are out of grace, you are legally required to either scrap the installation or activate it.

How does the activation work? If you purchase your computer with Windows 7 already preinstalled, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) will most likely have taken care of it for you and you won’t need to do anything else. If you install Windows 7 yourself, then activation is your responsibility. If it is a consumer edition on your home computer, you need to enter a retail product key and then initiate an activation either over the Internet or by telephone. If you are an IT pro and your company has a volume licensing (VL) agreement with Microsoft, you will use one of two volume activation (VA) methods.

Under your VL agreement, you can purchase a multiple activation key (MAK) with the requisite number of activations. Essentially, MAK activation works in the same manner as retail activation, except for the fact that you can use the same key for as many activations as you have paid for.

The second VA method is called Key Management Service (KMS). All VL editions of Windows 7 have a built-in publicly known KMS client key. To use KMS activation, you need to purchase a special KMS key and use it to activate a computer that will become a KMS host. When a KMS client computer is started for the first time, it will try to locate the KMS host by using DNS and will submit an activation request. And here comes a tricky part. You need to have at least 25 Windows 7 KMS clients before the KMS host will activate any of them, and the activation is good for only 180 days. Furthermore, in merely seven days, an already activated KMS client becomes restless and attempts to reactivate itself. If it succeeds, the 180-day count starts over and the client stays happy for another seven days. If a reactivation attempt fails, the client will keep trying every couple hours until it succeeds. And each time the KMS client connects to the KMS host, there better be enough other KMS clients around or the activation attempt can fail. The KMS host remembers each KMS client that submitted an activation request within the last 30 days. If your network is not very large and if clients are constantly on the move, it’s OK to occasionally have fewer than 25 KMS clients around, for relatively short periods of time. But you should strongly encourage everyone to come online at least once per month, and no one should be allowed to stay off the network for more than 180 days in a row.

If you work for a large company and there are thousands of KMS clients on your network, don’t think that you are necessarily in the clear. You might be up against a different challenge. Chances are one KMS host might not suffice and you might need to implement a few more. This is not uncommon, especially considering that the same KMS key is good for up to six KMS hosts. Each KMS host attempts to register an SRV record with DNS so that KMS clients can automatically discover the KMS hosts. By default, in an Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environment, an AD DS–integrated DNS zone supports only secure dynamic updates. The default permissions allow any domain computer to register itself and then to update its registration but do not allow computers to update one another’s records.

Suppose you need to implement two KMS hosts, and suppose their names are KMS1 and KMS2. When you configure KMS1, it will automatically register an SRV record named

 _vlmcs._tcp.DomainName

This record will include the name of KMS1 and the TCP port on which KMS1 will listen for client requests. The default permissions for this record will prevent any other KMS hosts from registering their own SRV records, which all have the same name but contain different information. Generally, attempts to register any additional SRV records with the same name are considered as updates to the first record. Therefore, without the default permissions being changed, any KMS hosts subsequently implemented in the same domain cannot create their SRV records for KMS in the domain. To enable KMS clients to automatically discover KMS2, you should assign KMS2 the Allow – Full control permission for the SRV record created by KMS1. Then KMS2 will be able to register a second, its own SRV record.

And one more tip. In some situations, you might be tempted not to leave anything to chance and to manually create all the necessary SRV records yourself. If you do so, then keep in mind that you will own those records and, unless you change their default permissions, only you will be able to update those records in the event if you ever need to configure any of the KMS hosts to use a different TCP port, if you replace any KMS hosts, or if you add new ones.

 

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