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

Migration options


All USMT scenarios can be split in the following two common migration scenarios: PC Refresh and PC Replacement.

PC Refresh scenario

The source and destination computer are the same. This scenario is used when upgrading the OS or reinstalling OS for break-fix. The administrator migrates the user and computer state to an intermediate store. This intermediate store can be a remote server/file share, an external drive, or a hard-link migration store on the same drive (if no repartitioning or change of partition type is needed). After installing the new OS on the same computer, the migrated data and settings are brought back and the migration store is deleted.

When using a remote server/file share, using a compressed (and encrypted) migration store is recommended.

When there is no need for repartitioning/formatting the hard disk, a hard-link migration store is recommended due to the speed benefit.

If the source computer OS is broken and cannot be started any more, use a PE environment...