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

The MDT method of driver detection and injection


When we boot a target machine via our LiteTouch media, one of the initial task sequence steps will enumerate (via PnPEnum.exe) all of the PnP IDs for every device in the machine. Then, as part of the Inject Drivers task sequence step, we will search all of our Out-of-Box Driver INF files to find the matching driver, then MDT will utilize DISM to inject these drivers offline into the applied WIM.

Note

Note that, by default, we will be searching our entire Out-of-Box drivers repository and letting PnP figure things out.

We will later discuss how to force MDT to only choose from the drivers that we specify, thereby gaining strict control over which drivers actually get installed.

The preceding scenario indicates that this whole process hinges on the fact that we are searching through driver INF files to find the matching PnP IDs in order to correctly detect and install the correct driver. This brings up a concern; what if the driver does not contain...