Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset

The Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DART), is another great tool in the MDOP suite.

The MDOP suite typically saves $70-80 net per pc per year (WIPRO reseach). DART can be $10 dollars of that.

DART is basically a bootable CD/DVD (USB and WIM work but are not supported) that runs on WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) and is used to troubleshoot/repair a client machine before just rebuilding.
It Can:

1. Recover an unbootable PC
2. Detect and remove malware (whilst the PC is booted in WinRE)
3. Delete, recover, save off files
4. Reset local Admin password
5. Manipulate services
6. etc

Benefits:

- Accelerates TCO savings by minimising recovery time and preventing data loss.

- Recover instead of rebuild - saves user time and allows root cause analysis

Rebuilding a unbootable PC guarantees data loss, this tool gives you the option to do data recovery at worst case and full system recovery at best. This way the user does not lose data or their time waiting on a rebuild and then their time setting things up just right.

Case study of a company called Ultrasonic Precision Inc they saw Help desk costs decrease 27% and end user downtime decrease between 50-60%.

Demo's were very effective is providing the crash analysis of a blue screen, and restoring data that had been accidentally deleted.

Tools included in DART:

• ERD Regedit - similar to normal one
• Locksmith - local admin PW reset
• Crash analysis - assesses BSOD and gives reasons/help
• File restore - will scan for all deleted files and give you a likelihood of recovery
• Disk commander - repair MBR, recover volumes/partition table
• Disk wipe - secure DoD level wipe to prevent data recovery
• Computer management - similar to normal
• Explorer - Gui based, not command prompt as normal WinRE, USB active to save files off or copy them back to restore service
• Solution Wizard - Wizard to help you choose the right tool to fix the problem (I would think if you need the wizard, you maybe are not the right person to be doing the work - ironically the presenter just said that too)
• TCP/IP config - if you want to get onto LAN or ensure you can get to internet for System sweeper toget updates.
• Hotfix uninstall
• System sweeper - malware/rootkit detection tool,
• SFC Scan - system file check can be used in Windows (assuming it boots), great to see it here at WinRE level (I have used SFC successfully a few times - correctly restore corrupt system files).

You can add DART tools to a hidden system partition of your builds to ensure they are a F8 option for troubleshooting (probably should not include locksmith).

Whilst it is a MDOP feature, once you are licensed for MDOP on your desktops, you can use it on servers too.

You can create a DART cd/dvd from within a virtual machine - very cool.

Find out more here

The 5 pieces of MDOP

This session was a quick runthrough of the 5 (soon to be 6) products that are available through MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack)

I guess the first thing to note is that MDOP is only available to customers that buy Software Assurance, which is Microsoft's version of the maintenance contract. It looks like relatively good value and seems to be the resting place of products that Microsoft have recently acquired

Desktop Error Monitoring is the first product, which allows a company to collect all the Dr. Watson error events from the desktops that are sent to Microsoft and analyse them. This works well with the second tool which is branded DaRT (Diagnostic and Recovery Tool) which you may have heard of as Winternals prior to Microsoft buying it. This allows centralised diagnosis of blue screen type events, and recovery in software related crashes. Useful where desksiders aren't available!

Advanced Group Policy Management isn't particularly relevant to us today, but when we start using Active Directory for our desktops this could well be critical, as it allows auditing and workflow for any policy changes. Seems to me that this should be in the core product though...

Asset Inventory Service (AIS) is a 'cloud based' inventory service that could be really useful for those hard to reach devices (salesforce laptops!), although when I spoke to the product manager he seemed a bit stumped on how you'd actually get the client onto the machines in the first place. Seems like a fairly large oversight to me! This product used to be known as AssetMetrics

Last and most interesting of all was Application Virtualisation (formerly SoftGrid), which is the application virtualisation technology. Loads more to discuss in up and coming sessions so I'll just say that this product is aimed at Application to Application isolation, and doesn't address Application to Operating System isolation, which is where the sixth product will come in (Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation, formerly Kidaro)