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

Best practices


A summary from TechNet (available at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825108.aspx ) and experiences from the field are outlined as follows:

  • Install applications before running the LoadState tool: This helps ensure that migrated settings are preserved. For Microsoft Office, this is required for migration to work correctly.

  • Do not use MigUser.xml and MigDocs.xml together: If you use both .xml files, some migrated files may be duplicated if conflicting instructions are given about target locations. You can use the /genmigxml command-line option to determine which files will be included in your migration, and to determine if any modifications are necessary.

  • Use MigDocs.xml for a better migration experience: If your dataset is unknown or if many files are stored outside of the standard user-profile folders, the MigDocs.xml file is a better choice than the MigUser.xml file, because the MigDocs.xml file will gather a broader scope of data. The MigDocs.xml file migrates...