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

Utilizing model variable to control what drivers are installed


As mentioned earlier, while using a default MDT task sequence, the Inject Drivers task sequence step will search your entire Out-of-Box drivers repository to find a matching driver. If you only have a few hardware models, and all models are from the same manufacturer, then this could very well suit your needs without problem; but let's consider the following scenario.

Let's say you have a Dell model that has a rebranded Broadcom Network Adapter. You also have an HP model that has a rebranded Broadcom Network Adapter of the same chipset. Now, Broadcom, Dell, and HP each have a driver. Based on what we discussed earlier about how PnP finds a matching driver, it would be possible for any of these three drivers to be a match, if both devices reported the same PnP ID, then Windows' driver ranking process would determine which driver is installed based on signed versus unsigned, version number, inbox versus Out-of-Box, and so on. So...