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

Boot media for the reference task sequence

Boot media is created when the reference share is right-clicked and you select Update Deployment Share.

This action runs a PowerShell script to update the WinPE share. This action is known as UpdateDP:

Import-Module "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Deployment 
  Toolkit\bin\MicrosoftDeploymentToolkit.psd1"
New-PSDrive -Name "DS001" -PSProvider MDTProvider -Root 
  "C:\ReferenceShare"
update-MDTDeploymentShare -path "DS001:" –Verbose

This script updates the boot directory with a WIM and ISO media for easy use in a VM-boot scenario or the creation of USB stick media.

Note

Windows 10

All the concepts shown in this chapter are still valid for Windows 10, but pay attention to the following points:

  • If you plan to create a Windows 10 image used for inplace upgrade, only pure OS, features on demand, and patches are allowed. Do not add any applications to an inplace upgrade Image.
  • For a normal wipe and reload...