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

Drivers as applications


Unfortunately, all drivers don't adhere to the usual .inf/.sys format, and in this case, the MDT driver injection method will not apply to these drivers. What I'm referring to is drivers that install via a .exe format and cannot be extracted to the usual .inf/.sys format that we are used to. In this case, we need to treat these drivers as applications. Let's say, for example, I have a trackpad driver for a particular laptop that I need to install and the driver installation program must be installed via a .exe program. I can import a new application into MDT. The command line must be configured to perform a silent install and you should also check the box in the application's Properties to hide the application so that it will not show up during the LiteTouch Deployment wizard. We will add the driver to our Task Sequence as follows:

Now, to ensure that this application/driver only gets installed on the machines that we need to install it on, we can take advantage...