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

Exploring the completed reference share


If we've completed the previous steps, we'll be rewarded with a reference share as shown in the following image, under Deployment Shares:

Clicking on MDT Reference Share will give us a view of some folders. These mirror, to some extent, is the flat filesystem that we have created:

As opposed to the filesystem shown in the following screenshot:

Note the presence of or absence of an attribute, depending on your scenario requirements, matching folders. MDT is keeping some records out of the user interface (UI) for us. This is quite intentional.

Tip

For typical best practice, one does not have to go into the actual filesystem for anything. In fact, all the times I've had to modify the filesystem rather than the UI, I was doing something I either shouldn't have been doing (we'll call it experimenting) or trying to fix something someone else had done (by their experimenting).

Setting reference properties

The first thing to do with our reference share is...