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

History


The User State Migration Tool (USMT) was designed as a command-line tool to move settings and data from one computer to another or to save and restore settings in case of break-fix. (break-fix is the repair of an IT system when computer equipment fails, the network stops functioning or software programs are not working by reinstalling the OS.) Some other GUI tools (for example, Windows Easy Transfer) rely on the technical base.

The first version of USMT migrated Windows 95/98 and Windows NT 4.0 computers to Windows 2000 using customized INF Files. This version was never available publicly for download. The first public version USMT 2.x added support for Windows 2000 source computers and Windows XP destinations.

The USMT 3.x version brought considerable changes, including the use of XML files for migration customization, file security migration, encrypted data storage and Windows Vista manifest support.

USMT 4.0 was included in Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) and adds significant...