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

ScanState and LoadState syntax


Writing down a full list of all possible ScanState and LoadState syntax and their possible combinations would exceed the limits of this chapter by far (and would also be very boring content).

For this reason, we will only highlight some particularly noteworthy command syntax you should take a closer look at, marked by ScanState only, LoadState only, and generally valid for both.

Command-Line Argument

Description

/o

(ScanState only)

Required to overwrite any existing data in the store location or Config.xml file. We recommend to delete migration store between executions.

/hardlink

Needs to be combined with the /nocompress option. It will enable the hard-link migration. StorePath needs to be on the same volume. When migrating files on different volumes and using /hardlink option the migration store spans also multiple volumes.

/vsc

(ScanState only)

Enables the volume shadow copy service to help with locked and in use files. It eliminates most...