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 (13 chapters)
4
4. Default User Profile Customization

Windows Performance Toolkit

WPT is a deep troubleshooting toolkit used to triage many scenarios in the Windows ecosystem. We can use it to troubleshoot power consumption problems, high CPU usage scenarios, heap leak analysis, and many other scenarios. This toolkit is covered in Clint Huffman's Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide, so I will not delve deeper into it here. Suffice it to say, the toolkit has a steep learning curve and requires a good knowledge of the Windows kernel and system architecture.

Michael Milirud gave a talk in 2011 in California on this subject and is on Channel 9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/events/BUILD/BUILD2011/HW-59T .