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

Reference image deployment


In previous chapters, we've discussed drivers, CustomSettings.ini configuration, task sequence, and many other items. All these concepts are utilized here as we build our reference image deployment task sequence and virtual machine. In our examples in this chapter, we're going to be utilizing Hyper-V as a virtualization host for simplicity and cost; other solutions can be used, but they add a complication layer in terms of drivers that need to be inserted into both the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Win PE) and actual driver store for the image itself. However, Hyper-V can pose the same concern with driver-versioning needs.

Tip

What this means is the native Hyper-V drivers that are shipped with Windows 7, for instance, will not work in a Hyper-V virtual machine hosted in Windows Server 2012 R2, for example. Back-level drivers will still need to be provided so that the Win PE and installation task sequence can see the network, and thus communicate with the deployment...