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

Deployment scenarios and network considerations


During the capture process, the task sequence follows the steps, determining the variables, making decisions whether to continue on error, and so on, all according to the task sequence created in the share. We've gone over the task sequence engine, settings, and variables, but we have not yet discussed the scenarios on the share itself, deployment strategies, replication for enterprise environments, and so on. We'll cover some of these scenarios now.

Firstly, deployment in most enterprises is considered a dangerous event. I've seen several misconfigured environments that started running SMS or MDT-based task sequences on production systems. User data is lost, days of productivity are lost, and IT careers are altered in a negative way. One such incident that is helpful to dissect occurred at a healthcare provider in the United States.

SMS advertised a deployment task sequence over an agent that told the agent to format the existing hardware and...