Book Image

Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

By : Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer
Book Image

Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

By: Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer

Overview of this book

Topic The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) provides a comprehensive collection of tools, processes, and guidance for automating desktop and server deployments. It considerably reduces deployment time and standardizes desktop and server images. Moreover, MDT offers improved security and ongoing configuration management. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is the official supported method of creating and customizing Windows images for deployment. Description: Starting from scratch, this book walks you through the MDT setup, task sequence creation, and image deployment steps in detail. Breaking down the various MDT concepts, this book will give you a thorough understanding of the deployment process. Beginning with imaging concepts and theory, you will go on to build a Microsoft Deployment Toolkit environment. You will understand the intricacies of customizing the default user profile in different versions of Windows. Driver handling can be a challenge for larger organizations; we’ll cover various driver concepts including mandatory driver profiles. ]Other important topics like the User State Migration Tool (USMT), configuration of XML files, and how to troubleshoot the USMT are also discussed in the book. We will cover the verifier and Windows Performance Toolkit for image validation scenarios. Furthermore, you will learn about MDT web frontend implementation as well as how to utilize the database capabilities of MDT for deeper deployment options. We’ll wrap it all up with some links to resources for more information, blogs to watch, and useful Twitter handles.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 10. Validating the Image

In the previous chapter, we discussed how to troubleshoot deployment logs and deployment share operations:

  • We looked at tools to decipher the MDT log files and error codes

  • We discussed the locations of the log files and importance of the logs in general

  • We also looked at a few common mistakes or errors that one might encounter in a standard MDT process

In this chapter, we will cover image validation scenarios:

  • We will talk to different tools that can be used to validate the image

  • We will check for bad drivers and poor performance and articulate the cost of purchasing lower-end hardware to the management

  • We will determine the operational and performance costs of anti-malware, antivirus, and other security auditing software

While it is all well and good to have a universal hardware-agnostic image deployed by the task sequence that lays down applications based on input criteria, how do we know that once the image reaches the end user, it will perform well? Do we know...