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

Win PE drivers


By default, MDT will inject all network adapter and mass storage drivers into the LiteTouchPE_x86/LiteTouchPE_x64 ISO/WIM file(s). If you want to specifically control which drivers are injected, you can create separate folders under your Out-of-Box Drivers node for WinPE_x86 and WinPE_x64 drivers, then create selection profiles for each of these folders. Navigate to the Properties of your deployment share | Windows PE tab | Drivers and Patches tab, and select the Selection profile for each architecture. The steps to inject specific drivers are as follows:

  1. The first step would be to create a selection profile to point to the specific folder where you have imported your Win PE drivers. You can accomplish this as outlined in the following screenshot:

  2. In the next step, name the selection profile. In this example, we are naming it WinPEx64, as shown in the following screenshot:

  3. We will then only select the folder that we want to include in the selection profile, as shown in the...