Today I have spend some time in taking a look at MED-V. I reviewed MED-V already about a year ago, but had not touched it since then. Microsoft just recently released an updated version of MED-V as part of the MDOP suite. While configuring a Workspace, my attention was caught by the “Clients should use Trim Transfer when downloading images for this Workspace” setting that is shown within the Virtual Machine Tab.

The documentation describes the setting as following:

Select this check box to enable Trim Transfer when downloading images associated with this MED-V workspace. If this check box is cleared, the full image will be downloaded.

Trim Transfer requires indexing the hard drive, which might take a considerable amount of time. It is recommended to use Trim Transfer when indexing the hard drive is more efficient than downloading the new image version, such as when downloading an image version that is similar to the existing version.

A detailed description of the MED-V Trim Transfer Technology can be found here

OK, just clicking a check box is not enough , I want to see that. I first configured a Workspace called Workspace and assigned a previously created Windows XP image, once the Image was published on the MED-V Server is launched the MED-V client on a second device. As you can see from the screen shot below, the image is downloaded from the server

I then created a second Workspace and assigned a slightly different image to it that is based on the first one I created, I just added another application to it. Once that Image was published to the server, I headed over to the MED-V Client device which prompted me that there was another Workspace available, after confirming, it started downloading that other image. But as you can see from the screen shot below, it is actually retrieving the data blocks from the local drive, hence not the complete image is being downloaded from the server again. 

Having trouble with a client not getting updates from your Windows Update Services Server ? Then have a look at the WSUS Client Diagnostics Tool.  The tool performs various system checks and tests the communication between your client and the WSUS server.

The Tool can be downloaded from the Windows Server Update Services Tools and Utilities site at Microsoft TechNet.

In an earlier post Using BITS for file downloads I wrote about how to use BITS for file transfers. Today I had a BITS related topic at work, so needed a brief refresher and found some additional interesting things.

First I came across a TechNet Utility Spotlight article Scripting Trouble-Free downloads with BITS. If you are interested in creating your own BITS based download scripts, read this article and download the provided bitsjob.vbs and bitsjob.cmd files. Note that the article is dated back from 2006, so no mention about Windows 7 here, but no worries bitsadmin.exe is included in Vista and Windows 7 already.

But then a few clicks later I came across this awesome nice FREE Tool called Bits GUI Admin. The tool provides a detailed view on all running BITS processes on your machine, so useful for troubleshooting as well. Note that the utility download does include a (old) bitsadmin.exe as well, but if you are running Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Server 2008(R2), I recommend that you overwrite that with the version of the OS. If you are running Windows XP or Server 2003, use the latest version which is available in the Service Pack 2 SP2 support tools.

The tool does not require installation, so just extract the files, update if the bitsadmin.exe if you like  and launch the bitsguiadmin.exe as Administrator. If you don’t see any existing processes running, simply go to Windows Update and select an available optional or security update to be installed or run a bitsadmin.exe command as described in one of my previous posts.

Bits GUI Admin can be downloaded from here

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