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

Updating up the deployment share


Next we're going to walk through updating the deployment share. Right-click on the reference share that we've just set up, and select Update Deployment Share:

The Update Deployment  Share Wizard dialog box will appear, as shown in the following image:

The defaults, as shown in the previous image, are fine here. You will typically only select the compress checkbox when you have retired a model of hardware and want to reclaim this driver whitespace out of the WinPE build. If you don't do this, it'll be consumed as you add newer drivers to the WinPE image. Click on Next.

Tip

The Completely regenerate the boot images option is typically used as a troubleshooting step when your boot media appears confused and it is best to rebuild from a known good set of settings rather than try to figure out what went wrong.

Automatic boot media creation

In the following screenshot of the Progress screen, MDT indicates that no existing boot image exists, so it is creating a new...