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 6. Drivers

In the previous chapter, we discussed the CustomSettings.ini file as it relates to Unattend.xml, what it does, how it works, and how to use it for your environment. We discussed that not only can we define global rules that apply to all task sequences, but we can also take advantage of variables to perform condition-based actions based on things such as hardware type, model, default gateway, or any variables that MDT defines during the gather phase, or even your own custom variables that you have created. These concepts are very important in our next topic of driver management.

In this chapter, we will discuss how to utilize MDT to make the complex world of device drivers into a much more manageable experience. We will focus on how drivers get installed via MDT, how to specifically control which drivers get installed, and general best practices around proper driver management.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Understanding offline servicing

  • The MDT method...