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

The structure of the CustomSettings.ini file


As we look at the structure of the Rules tab of a share, we are also looking at the CustomSettings.ini file. The structure of the file is fairly basic; there are two sections, the [Settings] area and the [Default] area:

[Settings] 
Priority=Default 
Properties=MyCustomProperty 
 
[Default] 
OSInstall=Y 
SkipAppsOnUpgrade=YES 
SkipCapture=NO 
SkipAdminPassword=YES 
SkipProductKey=YES 
_SMSTSOrgName=MDT Reference Task Sequence 
SkipBitLocker=YES 
SkipDomainMembership=YES 
JoinWorkgroup=Workgroup 
SkipFinalSummary=YES 
SkipLocaleSelection=YES 
SkipSummary=YES 
SkipTimeZone=YES 
SkipUserData=YES 
TimeZoneName=Eastern Standard Time 

Now what we see is under [Settings]; there are two entries, Priority and Properties. Priority defines the grouping order that is to be followed when there is a settings conflict. Properties is a place to define custom properties...