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

Customization of XML files


USMT does not include graphical editing tools.

By default, a huge list of files is already migrated. For a complete and up to date list see TechNet - What Does USMT Migrate?, available at  https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825238.aspx . For easy activation/deactivation of single components inside default XML files you can use /genconfig and edit the resulting Config.xml.

If you need to modify or create USMT XML files you should use an XML editor to do it safely. You can also use Visual Studio 2012 (Express) or newer.

To create a clean XML sample, open Visual Studio and select a new Visual C# project with a blank application. To add a blank XML, go to Solution Explorer, right click and add a new item, selecting the XML file item type.

Go to the XML menu, select Schemas.... In the Schemas dialog, add the MigXML.xsd from the USMT folder.

Now you can create your custom XML, excluding or including content.

Some examples are as follows:

Migrate registry keys

The...