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

Common errors and frequent pitfalls


Beside these two mentioned good troubleshooting documents (I'm sure there are more documents that are worth mentioning, but space is limited, and I want to share my findings with you), there are some more common errors to add.

Deployment stop during applying patches offline

During deployment task sequence at the Apply patches / Install Updates offline step, installation is failing and you get error message and deployment stops.

Possible solution: Some patches/hotfixes cannot be applied offline due to pending file actions. Identify the blocking patch by reviewing dism.log and CBS.log. Select/review first patch with error, as other error messages could be after effects. After applying such a pending action patch, following installations of patches can be prevented until the system is booted once.

To avoid this scenario, a /PreventPending option was introduced to DISM.exe to skip the installation of the package if the package or Windows image has pending online...