Microsoft Posts Free Vista Deployment Tools

Published: February 21, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft made it easier for larger businesses to make the move to Vista this week when it posted free downloads for six new tools for mass deployments of Windows Vista, including two tools for activating Vista licenses from Windows Server 2003. Although the tools come two-and-a-half months after the business availability of Windows Vista, Microsoft says they will be instrumental in helping with every stage of a migration to Vista, including assessment, planning, testing, and deployment.

Operating system upgrades are notoriously tedious and time consuming, especially for businesses whose livelihood depends on having computers that work. When hundreds or thousands of computers running customized applications are involved in an upgrade, the risks grow exponentially, requiring longer test and deployment cycles. Several third-party vendors offer tools to help automate and streamline the Windows migration process, and, of course, Microsoft offers its own set of tools.

The Microsoft set of tools received a big boost this week when they were released from beta testing and declared good to go for the computing masses. The tools now available include the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007, the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0, Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0, the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT), the Key Management Service (KMS) for Windows Server 2003, and Virtual PC 2007.

Support for KMS on Windows Server 2003 and the VAMT should provide a big boost in the activation of Vista licenses. Microsoft made some pretty big changes to the licensing process with Vista, and now there are two ways to validate Vista license keys, including the Multiple Activation Keys (MAK) method, which is best suited for companies with 25 computers or less, and KMS, which is designed for larger companies.

There are two ways to authenticate a computer under MAK. Under the independent activation method, each computer must connect to a Microsoft server over the Internet, or a user must call Microsoft on the phone, after the license key is entered on that system. The second MAK method, called proxy activation, can activate multiple computers with a single connection to a Microsoft server using VAMT, which runs on Windows Server 2003 and is one of the tools that just became available.

Under KMS, a single license key authenticates multiple copies of Windows Vista. To keep copies of Vista from entering Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM), computers must connect to the KMS service every 180 days. However, until now, the KMS service had to be run from a Windows Vista workstation, which was impractical for large users. (Windows Server "Longhorn" is the other choice for authenticating via KMS, but obviously nobody has Longhorn yet.) With this week's announcement, large businesses can now run the KMS service on Windows Server 2003, which should make Vista migrations and ongoing validations easier--or at least a little less painful.

To download VAMT, click on go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=77533. To download KMS for Windows Server 2003, follow this Microsoft link: go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=82964.

The remainder of the new tools will also play a role in alleviating business' pain during Vista migrations.

• BDD 2007 is set of guidelines and tools for helping organizations deploy Windows Vista and the Office 2007, and was designed to be the hub of Vista migration activity. The download includes single-image engineering and deployment capabilities, user-state migration tools, remote deployment tools, and integration with Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003, not to mention the other Volume Activation 2.0 tools, including ACT 5.0 and Windows Vista Hardware Assessment. To download BDD 2007, see http://www.microsoft.com/desktopdeployment
• ACT 5.0 is a tool that tells developers, ISVs, and other IT pros whether their existing applications are compatible with Vista. When it discovers compatibility problems, ACT 5.0 helps remediate the problems, and provides ongoing tracking throughout the application lifecycle. Microsoft also developed an online community for ACT where Microsoft and other companies can share their compatibility assessments and test results with the Vista community. Registered developers and TechNet subscribers can download ACT 5.0 for free at technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905102.aspx.
• Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0 helps businesses figure out which of their existing PCs have what it takes to run Vista. The tool can be used to automatically scan all PCs across a network to see if they have Vista-compatible hardware (Vista requires a bigger hard drive, more memory, and a faster graphics card than XP) and software (Vista requires new application drivers), and then generates a report based on what it finds. The tool can be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/technet/wvha
• Virtual PC 2007 enables users to run multiple operating systems, such as Windows XP, side by side with Windows Vista on a single PC. Microsoft says users of Windows Vista Enterprise Edition may take advantage of Virtual PC 2007 to run the additional copies of Windows to which they are entitled (Enterprise Edition allows them to run up to four). With the new release, the virtualization software has been "optimized" for Vista, including support for 64-bit versions of Vista, improved performance, hardware virtualization, and a new preboot execution environment (PXE) features. It can be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/virtualpc

Shanen Boettcher, general manager of Windows client product management at Microsoft, says the six new tools will help users take advantage of Vista's benefits in the areas of collaboration, search, reduced IT costs, improved security, and mobile computing. "With the availability of these new tools, there is nothing holding back businesses from making the move to Windows Vista and immediately taking advantage of those benefits."

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