Thursday, April 3, 2014

Applying a BranchCache Group Policy (GPO) to Windows 8 Pro: Bad idea

If you apply a BranchCache policy that sets a hosted cache server to a Windows 8 Pro or Windows 8.1 Pro computer, this machine will go havoc.

One symptom is that absolutely no GPO scripts from any policy will be execute because they all fail with Event ID 1130 from Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy in the SYSTEM event log.

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The reason is quite simple: Only Windows 8 Enterprise (BranchCache Requirements on TechNet) fully supports all features of BranchCache while Windows 8 Pro only supports a subset. So Windows 8 Pro tries to comply with the settings in the GPO but fails to do so. And instead of just ignoring the settings, it goes havoc…...

The easiest solution is to create a WMI filter for the BranchCache Client GPO that limits the policy to Enterprise versions:

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(select * from Win32_OperatingSystem WHERE OperatingSystemSKU=4)

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