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

Deployment share


The deployment share is quite similar to our reference share. Most of the content of the CustomSettings.ini and Bootstrap.ini will be the same. The OSes of the deployment share are simply the WIM files, which we just captured, the product of our reference share task sequences. The applications will be complex drivers for specific hardware devices or applications applied post-OS deployment. However, our base images are somewhat set in stone at this point. The WIM files from our reference share form the base operating system of our deployment task sequences.

Again, creation of the deployment share follows the reference share, with some naming differences:

Name the directory DeploymentShare to keep our naming standards correct. We absolutely want to keep the reference share and deployment share work separate. This gives us the flexibility of experimenting in the reference share space, building baseline images, tweaking task sequences, and so on, without impacting deployment...