Yesterday I was at a customer who uses WDS, MDT in combination with RES Automation Manager to roll out Windows 7 workstations. We created a database in MDT to store the serial number, the mac address and the host name of a machine. This is used when deploying a workstation so the sys admins don’t have to fill in the computer name during deployment. One of the sys admins asked me if we could automate the action of putting the data in the MDT database so when a new machine is deployed it  registers in the database without interaction.

So I wrote the following Powershell script which uses an additional powershell module named MDTDB.zip from this blog post by Michael Niehaus, you can download it by using this direct link. Place this on a share that can be reached by all workstations because the powershell script uses this module. To place a machine in the database for this customer we need three values: Mac address, hostname and serial number.

To get the mac adres:

# Get the values for the local host…
$strComputer = “.”

#Get MacAdres and set $MC
$colItems = get-wmiobject -class “Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration” -namespace “root\CIMV2” -computername $strComputer

foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {
# A test is needed here as the loop will find a number of virtual network configurations with no  “Hostname”
# So if the “Hostname” does not exist, do NOT display it!
if ($objItem.DNSHostName -ne $NULL) {
$MC = $objItem.MACAddress
}
}

Now we’ve set the mac address to $MC we can focus on the serialnumber:

#Get SerialNumber
$SN = wmic bios get serialnumber| select-string -notmatch SerialNumber

So with wmic bios get serialnumber we get more output than we need so we select the string and exclude the text SerialNumber. This way the only value in $SN is the serialnumber. The only value we need now is the hostname, that one is pretty easy:

#Get Hostname
$HN = Hostname

Now we’ve got all the information to fill the database with this new machine, so we have to import the module MDTDB and connect to the MDT database:

#Import Modules
Import-Module –name “\\Servername\Sharename\MDTDB.psm1”

#Connect to database
Connect-MDTDatabase -sqlserver SQLSERVERNAME -database DATABASENAME

With this connection made we can put the data into the database using the following script:

#Create new computer with specified data
New-MDTComputer –macAddress $MC -serialnumber $SN –settings @{

OSInstall=’YES’;

OSDComputerName=$HN;

OrgName=’ORGANISATIONNAME’}

After a refresh of the MDT database you will see there’s a new record in the database.  Now we can use this script to create a module in RES Automation Manager, just create a new module with a Powershell task. Selec the “Use Windows Powershell script from “Script’ tab” and copy/paste the script into the script tab:

Now you’re set to use this script during deployment. I’ve added it to the project that runs when the machine is added to a team a created so when a machine is deployed with WDS, MDT the RES Automation Agent is installed and based on the team it will run a certain project and this module is now part of this project.

You can download the script here.

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

Latest posts by Kees Baggerman (see all)

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• Updated: VM Reporting Script for Nutanix with Powershell - July 3, 2019
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