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

Summary


In this chapter, we gave you some insight and guidelines into troubleshooting, and helped you gather up as much experience as possible. This includes experiences around standard problems and specific problems and solutions, as well as techniques for getting to the root cause, even for uncommon issues that no one has seen before. Now it is up to you to get familiar with the logs and get trained in hunting down the root cause.

 

But most of us realize that "perfection" cannot be achieved. That means we will need to do troubleshooting. So how do you do this effectively? Well, there are really two ways:

  • Learn through your own experiences.

  • Learn through the experiences of others.

So which is the best? Neither, as you need to be able to do both. You want to leverage the experience of others while also learning how to investigate your own unique issues without depending on others to do it for you.

 
 --Michael Niehaus in September 2012

However, don't become desperate with your problems; there...