When you consider these basic questions—what hardware does the
new software require? and do our workstations meet those
requirements?—you are likely to find the first question is easy
because the Windows 7 system requirements are readily available on the
Microsoft Web site. But the second can pose a problem.
In the IT manager’s idea of a perfect world, all of the
organization’s workstations are identical: the same model computer
with the same hardware inside, a single operating system, and
application configuration throughout the enterprise. Of course, most
of these managers know that this is a dream that very seldom comes
true.
Companies rarely buy all of their workstations at once. They
typically buy computers in lots from large vendors or manufacturers.
Even if they buy from the same vendor every time, models and supply
situations change so quickly that the computers they purchase today
are likely to have substantially different components than those they
bought only a few months ago.
IT managers also must consider the practices of maintenance and
support. When a workstation hard disk fails, an IT person might
replace it with a different model the team happens to have on hand.
When a department adopts a new application, workstations might need
installations of extra memory to support it. The designers in the
Marketing department might require high-end graphics adapters in their
workstations. The result is a fleet of workstations with widely
varying hardware and software configurations. A dedicated and
disciplined IT staff might keep careful records of these
modifications, but in a busy department, the documentation often is
deferred, delayed, or forgotten altogether.
Organizations considering a Windows 7 deployment might need to
perform a detailed inventory of the hardware in each existing
workstation. A hardware inventory should include the following
information for each computer:
The ways to discover this information are discussed in the
following sections. Which one you choose depends on how many
workstations you have to inventory, how much you can afford to spend,
and what other uses you might make of the inventory tool.
The simplest method for gathering workstation
inventory information is, of course, to look at each computer. You
can open each computer case and look inside, but even then, it can
be hard to locate the information you need. Components are often not
clearly marked on the outside, and many computers pack them in so
tightly that you would have to disassemble them to find out, for
example, the capacities of the hard disks. And even if you can
determine the disk capacities in this way, you have no way of
knowing how much free space there is on the disks without starting
the computer and manually checking free space as well.
This method is far too complicated if you have more than two
or three workstations to inventory. What you need is some sort of
tool that produces a report listing the hardware inside the
computer.
All of the Windows operating systems have an application
called System Information, which can display extensive information
about the hardware and software configuration of the local computer
or another computer on the network. System Information can provide
all of the essential inventory information listed earlier, and a
great deal more. You can save the reported information to a System
Information file with an .nfo extension, for later access, or to a
text file.
In Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP, System
Information is accessible from the Start menu, in the All
Programs\Accessories\System Tools\ folder. Launching the program
displays a system summary for the local computer, as shown in Figure 1. This page
includes processor and memory information.
The Components\Display\ page, shown in Figure 2, contains
information about the graphics adapter.
The Storage\Drives\ page, shown in Figure 3, lists the
hard disks in the system, their capacities, and the amount of free
space available. Selecting View\Remote Computer\ enables you to
connect to another system on the network and view its system
information as well.
Although the System Information program provides the
inventory information an IT technician needs to determine whether a
workstation meets the system requirements for Windows 7, the process
of gathering and analyzing the information is slow, and for a large
network, all but unmanageable. The only way to store the workstation
hardware inventory information in one central location would be to
create a repository yourself, manually, using a spreadsheet or
similar program. The administrators of a medium or large enterprise
network need a tool that can gather hardware information from all of
the computers on the network into a single interface.
Using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager
Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
2007 is a network management application that, among
many other capabilities, can perform an inventory of the hardware
and software in all of the computers on your network and store the
information in a centralized database for later analysis. SCCM can
also manage software updates, distribute software packages, remotely
administrator network computers, and deploy operating systems. In
fact, the Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) deployment process defined
in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 requires an SCCM
infrastructure.
SCCM is an excellent tool for creating a hardware inventory,
but it is not a product that you are likely to use solely for that
purpose. First, it’s an expensive product, requiring you to purchase
licenses for each server and client on your network. Second,
installing, configuring, and deploying SCCM requires a separate
database server and the installation of client agents on each
workstation.
For assessing the current hardware configuration of your
workstations, with an eye toward a Windows 7 deployment, SCCM is
almost overkill. The SCCM Hardware Inventory Client Agent queries
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) on the workstation,
enabling it to collect information on over 1,500 hardware properties
and report it to the SCCM site server.
Assuming that you have SCCM fully installed, enabling the
Hardware Inventory Client Agent on your workstations causes them to
transmit inventory information to the site server at regular
intervals. You can then view the information by using Resource
Explorer in the SCCM 2007 Administrator Console.
Using the Microsoft Assessment And Planning Toolkit
5.0
For an enterprise that has not invested in SCCM, you
can choose other, simpler, options for automating the process of
compiling a hardware inventory. There are many third-party products
that can compile a workstation inventory, but the Microsoft
Assessment And Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is particularly well
suited to this task.
One of the biggest advantages of the MAP Toolkit is that it
does not require you to install an agent or other client program on
the computers you want to inventory. After you install the program
on a Windows server or workstation, it can scan the network and, by
using Active Directory Domain Services, IP addresses, or network
broadcast messages, locate other computers and query them for
information about their hardware and software configurations, as
shown in Figure 4.
Exam Tip
The MAP Toolkit is not a full-featured network management
tool, as SCCM 2007 is. Instead, it is specifically designed to
assess the readiness of workstations and servers for the
installation of Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 R2,
or Windows Server 2008. The program is relatively easy to install
and use, and it’s free.
Like SCCM, the MAP Toolkit stores its inventory information in
a Microsoft SQL Server database, but unlike SCCM, it can use the
free SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, which it downloads and
installs automatically during the setup process. The toolkit is
scenario-based, enabling you to specify how you want to use the
inventory data. After the program completes its client scan, it
displays its results in the Microsoft Assessment And Planning
Toolkit console, as shown in Figure 5.
Because it is designed specifically for Windows deployment
scenarios, MAP Toolkit also enables you to generate boilerplate
reports and proposals, into which the program inserts the inventory
information it has gathered from the clients. A hardware assessment
report generated by the toolkit takes the form of an Excel
spreadsheet containing the raw inventory results, as shown in Figure 6.
