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

Virtual machine creation


The screenshots and text are taken from Windows 8.1 Update 1, which is quite similar to Windows Server 2012 R2 as well. Most concepts will apply to down-level Hyper-V hosts as well though.

  1. The first action item is to create a virtual machine. Generally speaking, a virtual machine with one core and 2 GB of RAM is adequate for our purpose. We'll walk through the wizard and create our virtual machine as follows:

    Virtual Machine name

  2. In the next step, we'll want to select Generation 1. This is to support both x86 and x64 versions of Windows, and also Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, as well as newer OSes:

    Generation 1 selection

  3. In our next selection, we'll specify 2,048 MB for Startup memory, and not check the box for Use Dynamic Memory for this virtual machine. We don't want the hypervisor to try to reduce the RAM footprint of our system while it's installing software, Windows Updates, and so on:

    No Dynamic Memory here!

  4. Then on the next screen, we need the virtual machine...