How an Enterprise Administrator can Determine MED-V 2.0 FTS Completion and Provide Remediation quickly.

When deploying large amounts of MED-V 2.0 workspaces in the enterprise, Microsoft offers several flexible options for determining on a large scale if MED-V First-time-setup occurred properly. The goal of this is to be able to incorporate this into an existing software/operations management infrastructure.

Event Viewer/Event Collections

In Windows 7, under the Applications and Services Event Logs, is the MEDV Event log for the Host Agent. If you are tracking event logs through an operations management application or other event collector you can leverage the following Event ID’s for tracking FTS progress.

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) Configuration Pack

Microsoft also makes available a DCM (Desired Configuration Management) pack for MED-V FTS. You can download the DCM package here.

https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26219

This MED-V Configuration Pack provides a way for administrators to use the Desired Configuration Management feature of System Center Configuration Manager to track the successes and failures of FTS.

The MED-V WMI Provider

MED-V 2.0 includes a fully-featured WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) provider. You can also leverage any ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) solution that leverages WMI through a WQL query, script, or even through the WMIC command.

For example, the WMIC command above:

Wmic /NAMESPACE:\\root\microsoft\medv PATH FTS_Status

returns the status code of 3013 indicating an error mirroring what will be in the local hosts event viewer’s MEDV log (Error Detected  While launching workspace setup sequence.)

Whereas the command below indicates successful completion (FTS_status=0.)

So what if there are errors? What is the best way to test FTS completion? For me, if there is an error during testing or even post-deployment, I will change the FTS mode from unattended to attended so I can watch the setup through the VPC preview screen. You can do this by changing the Mode registry value:

KEY: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Medv\v2\Fts

Value = Mode

Data = Attended

You can also adjust the Powershell code by switching the –FtsMode switch over to “Attended” as shown in the example PowerShell code below:

Now, the setup will show you the progress and you can home in on the issue that may be happening behind the scenes. In the example below, we see the failure is actually a timeout due to an invalid parameter being specified for the domain in the SYSPREP.INF file.