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

Setting up MDT for the first time


To implement Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), one must have a properly provisioned system on which we can lay down the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) and MDT install files. It must have space, CPUs, some amount of RAM, and most importantly, quick network links to other systems.

All the particulars around these requirements of course depend on what you are using MDT for. Are you building a golden image with which you will deploy via another deployment system? Are you implementing a deployment scenario where you need to deploy to laptops, desktops, medical imaging systems, and point-of-sale devices at multiple sites around the world, all from one infrastructure?

Setting up the virtual machine

So, for the sake of moving things along, we'll start small—with nothing. In this chapter, we'll get started with a single system. In order to illustrate, we will be using Windows Server 2012 R2, so transfers will be faster over the new Server Message...