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

Microsoft deployment toolkit logs and task sequencer logs


Each MDT script creates its own individual log file during execution. These log files normally match the script name (for example, ZTIGather.logZTIDiskpart.log, and so on) or begin with the script name (for example, ZTIConfigureDHCP_DISM.log). Additionally, each script writes to the common BDD.log. The information written to both log files is the same; so normally, it is okay to just take a look at the aggregated BDD.log as it contains everything needed.

The position of BDD.log and individual script logs changes several times during the deployment process. During the Windows PE phase, when there is no partition accessible/existing, the log file will be hosted under X:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS. As soon as partition is accessible/created, logs will be transferred to C:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS. MDT copies the scripts without deleting the logs in the old location, so make sure to view at the newest/up-to-date copy of the logs.

After completion...