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

GUI wrappers for USMT


USMT does not provide any GUI for its three command-line tools. Additionally, USMT command-line input can be very complex. There are many third-party GUI frontends available on the Internet, and also commercial products incorporating the USMT engine. I will pick some of the GUI frontends you should have a closer look at:

  • USMTGUI (http://usmtgui.ehler.dk/): A very powerful one window GUI for USMT. Newer versions of USMTGUI are now Donation ware. Depending how much you donate, you will get the basic or the pro version. The new pro version is now also able to handle all advanced USMT features for offline migration.

  • Workstation Migration Assistant (http://dcunningham.net/applications/workstation-migration-assistant/ ): This nice looking UI was written by Dan Cunningham and is now open source, and the source code is available on GitHub. It is highly customizable so you can adapt it to your needs.

Note

Windows 10

All the concepts shown in this chapter are still valid for Windows...