First a quick background, we use MDT to deploy Windows and software to all our physical desktops/laptops/servers as well as virtual machines in our large VMware ESXi environment. Boston is our central location and biggest office, so here I have 1x MDT Server (parent/root), 1x MDT Server replicated via MDT with a selection profile specific to the needs of our QA department, 1x WSUS, 1x WDS for PXE. This setup has worked great for us.
Over the last 6 months our infrastructure team has started dropping small ESXi environments in satellite offices to grant them local compute. I discovered DFSR and have used it to sync the root MDT box from Boston, to its VM counterparts in Hyderabad and Singapore, which are both on subdomains. There are some exceptions: the Boot folder, Captures folder, CustomSettings.ini, Bootstrap.ini, DeployWiz_ComputerName.xml (I have made custom ones for each office to provide AD OU selection lists), Settings.xml, and LinkedDeploymentShare*. Since these are smaller sites, I have also installed WDS and WSUS (which uses WSUS replication from Boston) on the MDT VMs, so it's full deployment in a box.
I have tested this setup multiple times with different task sequences including Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 on VMs in both sites, and they work without a hitch. So then the Singapore office buys a few Dell desktops, same as the ones we use in Boston. I think I'm hot shit because I'm going to have him PXE himself, and go through the easy to follow prompts to build the machines, rather than shipping them to/from Boston. He was excited to try it, and of course it blew up in my face.
So after working back and forth for almost 2 weeks, I've finally narrowed down the symptoms, and I'm hoping someone can shed some light. When a deployment is started in Singapore all seems normal, it applies the base image, boots into Windows, it's joined to the Singapore subdomain, and it starts doing Window updates. Once it gets to a point during updates where it wants to reboot, it does as expected. Then it gets weird, Administrator doesn't log back on! When I check the MDT server, monitoring says FAILED. I can login as Administrator and nothing is happening. I reboot the machine and login again, and I am prompted about a dirty environment. I say no, and it continues on until the next expected reboot where it does the same thing, Administrator doesn't login automatically, I login as Administrator and nothing is happening, reboot, login as Administrator and dirty environment, click no, rinse and repeat.
I am just having a terrible time trying to figure out why it works fine on VMs in the remote site on the subdomain, but doesn't work on physical desktops. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Jay