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

Supported scenarios and minimum requirements


USMT does not have any explicit or its own CPU, RAM, graphics or HDD requirements. It relies furthermore on the system requirements of the operating system it is executed on. If you do not use hard-link migration or external disk or network path, the hard drives must have sufficient space to contain the migration store, whether compressed or not. Additionally, it will need some temporary space. If unsure, you can estimate the needed space by using scanstate.exe /p.

Note

USMT supports migration to the same OS or a newer OS, but it does not support migration to an older OS. It supports migrating from 32-bit to 32-bit, 32-bit to 64-bit and 64-bit to 64-bit. It does not support migrating from 64-bit to 32-bit. ARM is completely unsupported and so you cannot migrate from any ARM edition nor to any ARM edition.

The following table lists the operating systems supported in USMT 5.0:

Operating System

ScanState (Source PC)

LoadState (Destination PC...