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

Chapter 9. Troubleshooting Deployment Logs

In the previous chapter, we discussed how to migrate user data. Now it is time to discuss what to do when things go wrong or do not deliver the expected results.

The Windows deployment process contains many moving targets—scripts, tools, utilities, and other stuff are brought together for a complete end-to-end deployment process. In a perfect world, all of these things would work perfectly and there would be no need to troubleshoot.

However, as you may already realize, perfection is hard to achieve and will probably never be achieved. This means that we will need to do some troubleshooting.

In this chapter, we'll discuss which logs we should look at if the deployment fails. We will give a summary of the logs you will be most concerned with when troubleshooting a failed OS deployment via Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2013. We will show some common error codes and how to solve them.

We will also discuss frequent pitfalls and common mistakes and how to...