FactoryTalk View SE, Historian SE Development Sprint

Not a flex, more of a Hail Mary in response to delayed shipping… I had engineers sitting around waiting for our new Dev server to upgrade an old circa 2014 PlantPAx system to the latest and greatest Rockwell software, OS, and migrating from ESXi to Hyper-V.

Having done a few of these already, it should have been fairly straightforward. But delays in the contract led to delays in ordering, which only got worse when shipping was also delayed.

So, I put in some time at the shop over the weekend to get it built for Monday. Shocked it only took four hours once I got rolling.

I 100% do not condone weekend work. Plan better than me.

But sometimes even the best planning doesn’t survive first contact with reality and those shutdown dates don’t move.

So, I took away two things from this weekend’s work:

1. Weekend work sucks, but it’s 1000% more productive without distractions.
2. New Dell bare-metal installs are nothing like they were 5+ years ago.

I must have gotten lazy spinning up VMs. The last servers I built from scratch were old Dell R640s in 2021. UEFI existed back then, and you could still install directly from a USB drive prepped to boot the install .iso.

With this new R660, I got to learn about Lifecycle Controllers and OS Deployment the hard way.

I initially went to the well of previous experience: using a bootable USB stick. Prepped it as FAT32, flagged it bootable, and xcopied the source files over.

It booted fine but hung on install.wim. Given the file size, I figured it was a FAT32 issue. So, I created a second partition on the USB drive and moved the .iso directly.

After booting off the FAT32 drive, I switched to a command prompt, mounted the .iso from the NTFS partition, and re-ran the setup from there.

Boom, smiling as it got past the install.wim corruption. Feeling good about my cleverness, I quickly crashed into a driver wall. The installer didn’t see the RAID adapter, disks, or anything.

After an hour of trolling the web (Reddit, Stack Exchange, anywhere), I stepped back and realized I’m turning into an old man stuck in my old ways.

Dropped into YouTube, typed “install Windows Server on Dell R660,” and found a six-minute video of some guy showing how to use the Lifecycle OS deployment.

After selecting the install media, a screen flashed “preparing driver package”, and off it went. Took 10 minutes tops using the right tool.

Not sure there’s a point to this story other than weekend work sucks and try to learn new things.

Good luck on your projects!