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

Populating the Out-of-Box Drivers node of MDT


The first step will be to visit the OEM Manufacturer's website and download all device drivers for each model machine that we will be deploying to. Note that many OEMs now offer a deployment-specific download or CAB file that has all of the drivers for a particular model compressed into one single CAB file. This benefits you as you will not have to go through the hassle of downloading and extracting each individual driver for each device separately (NIC, video, audio, and so on). Once you have downloaded the necessary drivers, to store them in a folder for each specific model, you will need to extract the drivers within your folder before importing them into MDT.

Next, we want to create a folder structure under the Out-of-Box Drivers node in MDT to organize our drivers. This will not only allow easy manageability of drivers as new drivers are released by the OEM; but if we name the folders to match the model names exactly, we can later also introduce...