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- Sprache: Englisch
Take a deep dive into the world of Windows desktop deployment using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
About This Book
- Learn Microsoft Deployment Toolkit best practices and how to adopt them into your deployment project
- Troubleshoot task sequence errors and quickly resolve deployment blockers
- An easy-to-follow, in-depth guide to image creation, customization, and deployment of Windows
Who This Book Is For
This book is ideal for those deploying or planning to deploy Windows, in need of a top-to-bottom guide on project deployment. It is also an invaluable resource for consultants who need a top-to-bottom guide (or just a refresher) on project deployment.
What You Will Learn
- Build a production-ready MDT environment
- Administer the environment for multiple users
- Customize your reference image with an MDT Task Sequence
- Create standalone media for offline deployments
- Customize the default user profile according to the version of Windows
- Get to grips with some troubleshooting steps and processes to reduce the time for recovery of a failed image
- Customize and create Windows images for deployment
- Discover useful tips and tricks to help save time in your deployment projects
In Detail
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.
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.
Style and approach
This is a comprehensive guide written using a step-by-step approach. It begins with the basics and gradually moves on to the advanced topics MDT.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: May 2016
Production reference: 1260516
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78217-249-9
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Credits
Authors
Jeff Stokes
Manuel Singer
Copy Editor
Vibha Shukla
Reviewers
Florian Klaffenbach
Brian Mithen
Project Coordinator
Nidhi Joshi
Commissioning Editor
Saleem Ahmed
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Acquisition Editors
Saleem Ahmed
Prachi Bisht
Indexer
Mariammal Chettiyar
Content Development Editor
Mayur Pawanikar
Graphics
Jason Monteiro
Technical Editor
Pranil Pathare
Production Coordinator
Arvindkumar Gupta
About the Authors
Jeff Stokes is a deployment and performance specialist for Windows operating systems. Jeff has a passion for the user experience in enterprise environment. As an avid public speaker, podcaster, blogger, and mentor, Jeff started his IT career at Digital in the 90s, and has been hard at work ever since. Currently, employed at Microsoft, he is expanding his horizons with projects in big data and data analytics.
When not working, he enjoys spending time with his family and friends. His hobbies are gaming, music, and writing.
I'd like to thank my wife, Ana, for her continued support. I couldn't have done this without you! I would also like to give a nod to Carl Luberti, Michael Niehaus, Aaron Margosis, Bill Curtis, and all the other deployment folks I've learned so much about deployment from over the years.
Manuel Singer works as a Premier Field Engineer for Windows Client at Microsoft and is based in Germany. He has more than 10 years of experience in system management and deployment using Microsoft technologies. He specializes in client enterprise design, deployment, performance, reliability, and Microsoft devices. Manuel works with local and international top customers from the private and public sectors, providing professional, technical, and technological support.
Additionally, he is an experienced Microsoft Certified Trainer and holds public and private Microsoft workshops across Europe. He is also a speaker and ask the expert at various Microsoft premier events.
First and foremost, my thanks goes out to my wife, Renate, who allowed me to follow my dreams and make every day worth living, and my two wonderful children, Cornelius and Theresa, who constantly remind me of what's important in my life. Furthermore, I would like to thank all the people who have supported me throughout the writing of this book. Last but not least, I would like to thank the team at Packt Publishing for their support throughout the process of writing this book.
About the Reviewers
Florian Klaffenbach started his IT career in 2004 as a first and second level IT support technician and IT salesman trainee for a B2B online shop. Later, he moved to a small company, working as an IT project manager, planning, implementing, and integrating industrial plants and laundries into enterprise IT. In some time, he changed his path to Dell Germany. There, he started from scratch as an enterprise technical support analyst and later worked on a project to start Dell technical communities and support over social media in Europe and outside of the US. Currently, he is working as a solutions architect and consultant for Microsoft Infrastructure & Cloud, specializing in Microsoft Hyper-V, file services, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Microsoft Azure IaaS.
Additionally, he is active as a Microsoft blogger and lecturer. He blogs, for example, on his own page, Datacenter-Flo.de, or Azure Community Germany. Together with a very good friend, he founded the Windows Server User Group Berlin to create a network of Microsoft IT pros in Berlin. Florian maintains a very tight network with many vendors such as Cisco, Dell, and Microsoft and communities. This helps him enhance his experience and get the best solution for his customers. Since 2016, he is also the co-chairman of the Azure Community Germany. In April 2016, Microsoft awarded Florian the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Cloud and Datacenter Management.
Florian has worked for several companies, such as Dell Germany, CGI Germany, and his first employer, TACK GmbH. Currently, he is working at msg services ag in the role of senior consultant in Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure. He has worked on the books Learning System Center App Controller, Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials, and Mastering Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, all by Packt Publishing. He is also currently working on Mastering Cloud Development using Microsoft Azure, by Packt Publishing.
I want to thank Packt Publishing for giving me a chance to review the book. I also want to thank my employer and my girlfriend. Especially her, for not killing me because I spend so much of my spare time on the community and work.
Brian Mithen is a systems and network administrator with the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library in Kansas. He maintains group policies and MDT deployment strategies for over 400 computers in use by the staff and public. When not at work, he breeds and shows American Bullies on the A.B.K.C. circuit with his kennel 8-Bit Bullies.
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Preface
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 is a lightweight task sequencing environment and has a well-established community of IT professionals that use it. It's fully supported by Microsoft and is available for free.
"Q: Why is it still "MDT 2013" when the year is almost 2016? Two primary reasons. First, we have only made minor changes to MDT which in our opinion does not constitute a major version revision. Second, per the MDT support lifecycle, a new major version will drop support for MDT 2012 Update 1 which still supports legacy platforms."
--Aaron Czechowski, Senior Program ManagerWith its support for Windows 7 and higher versions, including Windows 10 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and higher versions, it is the ideal tool for golden image creation and image deployment. This article will help you understand the important imaging techniques and build up your own MDT 2013 environment.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Imaging Concepts and Theory, covers the basic terminology of imaging, when to use thick versus thin versus hybrid images, and why deployment changed in Vista and higher versions. Furthermore, the reader will learn the concepts behind reference image versus deployment image, where to integrate patches and why, and what apps and drivers are from the MDT perspective.
Chapter 2, Setting Up Your Environment, explains how to construct an MDT environment from scratch. This chapter will be a walkthrough of the different installation options and will explain why I recommend a particular configuration for production environments.
Chapter 3, Creating Reference Images, helps to understand the principles of a reference image and how it applies to the organization. Sysprep practices, patching, maintenance, and bitness will be covered in depth.
Chapter 4, Default User Profile Customization, covers the intricacies of customizing the default user profile from version to version of Windows. Tools and concepts available to brand the image, tweaking settings prior to deployment, and supported methods of doing so will be discussed in this chapter.
Chapter 5, CustomSettings.ini and Task Sequence, covers the CustomSettings.ini file and task sequence engine in detail and depth. Tips for customizing the deployment share, enabling logging, branding, and more will be covered here.
Chapter 6, Drivers, explains how driver handling can be a challenge for larger organizations. We’ll cover driver concepts, when drivers are applications and when they are drivers and how to handle both scenarios, and also mandatory driver profiles.
Chapter 7, Image Deployment, focuses on the deployment share configuration, deployment best practices, and guidelines on securing the deployment share.
Chapter 8, USMT - The User State Migration Tool, covers USMT in depth, configuration of XML files, walkthroughs of the process, and troubleshooting. This also includes XML configuration and customization, USMT process top to bottom, and troubleshooting.
Chapter 9, Troubleshooting Deployment Logs, shows what to do when things go wrong. How to read MDT logs, which log file contains what data, how to interpret the binary error codes, and frequent pitfalls will be covered as well. We will also cover error code resolution, MDT log files, Trace32, and error messages.
Chapter 10, Validating the Image, covers Driver Verifier and Windows Performance Toolkit for image validation scenarios. We will talk about different tools that can be used to validate the image, check for bad drivers and poor performance, articulate the cost of purchasing lower-end hardware for management, and the operational and performance costs of anti-malware, antivirus, and other security-auditing software.
Chapter 11, Database, UserExit Scripts, and Web Services, explains the ability to web frontend the MDT implementation, as well as how to utilize the database capabilities of MDT for deeper deployment options. Also, we’ll discuss a little about UserExit scripts. We’ll get into the whys and hows of UserExit scripts, what options are available, and when to use them.
Appendix, Additional Enterprise Configuration Items, discusses some considerations of the Windows 10 tool set, as well as some configuration suggestions for secure environments.
What you need for this book
MDT 2013 Update 2 (6.3.8330), Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2 x64 or Windows 10 installation with Hyper-V enabled, and ISOs of the OS and software you want to image/deploy will be required for this book.
Who this book is for
This book is for IT professionals who want to take a deeper look into imaging techniques and setting up a MDT 2013 environment.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The ADK comes as a web installer, adksetup.exe, by the way."
A block of code is set as follows:
[Default] DeployRoot=\\mdt-share\Reference Share UserID=< > UserDomain=< > UserPassword=< > SkipBDDWelcome=YESWhen we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<var name="ISDESKTOP"> <![CDATA[ True ]]> </var>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
msiexec /i EnterpriseFoxitReader605.0618_enu.msi /qnNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The primary area we are concerned with is the Deployment Shares line, which we will select with the mouse, and then right-click to select New Deployment Share."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at [email protected], and we will do our best to address the problem.
Chapter 1. Imaging Concepts and Theory
In this chapter, you'll learn the concepts and best practices of Microsoft Windows imaging techniques and in doing so learn the terminology associated with deployment. You will also become familiar with the different approaches to imaging and when each approach is generally regarded as the best in show for a given scenario. Finally, you'll learn some history on how things have changed in imaging from the old Windows XP style deployment to Windows 7, Windows 8, and now Windows 10. The solutions accelerator from Microsoft, the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), is the answer to a lot of the deployment problems facing deployment projects and will be the focus of this book.
Imaging history
In the beginning there was DOS, and it was good. But then there was a need for more and Windows came into being. At first, it was OK to pop the floppy disks that contained Windows for Workgroups into machines one by one on each computer individually in an enterprise environment. But soon, businesses started asking for things such as configuration settings for deploying Windows en masse.
And so, Unattend.txt and Sysdiff.exe and other fun things were created, where the intrepid NT 3.5 admin could build a machine, tweak it, and run Sysdiff to create a template with which other installations could follow and be identical, more or less. Later, as things progressed, the need was strong for a way to really clone machines!
And so, in the distant past (10+ years ago), the world of imaging and deploying the Windows Client came to be ruled by disk sector duplication deployments. This process was fairly involved, in that a technician would install a copy of Windows XP, patch it, install updated drivers, configure Windows XP's look and feel, install applications, patch the applications and finally configure the applications. After that was done (a process that could take a day or more) it was captured with a tool in a sector-by-sector fashion into a file for later deployment over network or media, again, sector-by-sector. Thus the technician would have an image, for a single model of computer, with a single set of applications.
So imagine an enterprise-level environment with say, 10 models of computers (I've seen some with over 100 models so 10 is a good example) and 1-3 sets of applications installed per model. Now the technician (or now it's most likely technicians at this point) is patching and managing roughly 10-30 images in our conservatively estimated enterprise environment. We didn't even throw 32 bit versus 64 bit into the equation.
So this poses a few problems for deployment projects that may not be readily apparent:
But around 2006, with the release of Windows Vista, things changed. There was a new paradigm in image deployment that would change everything: the Windows Imaging Format (WIM) format. The WIM format is essentially a container for an image. With it, and some tools from the Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK), one can service the Windows image offline, which allows us to add patches, drivers, and remove components such as games from our image, all without having to install it first on bare-metal hardware.
An example of this would be something like the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) command (in an elevated command prompt) to remove a hotfix from your running system:
DISM /online /remove-package /packagename:Package_for_KB2868623~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.1.1Around this same time enters a tool known as BDD. The Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) toolkit was a set of scripts that could be used to customize, configure, and deploy the Windows image in the enterprise environment. BDD 2.5 was released in August 2005, prior to the RTM of Vista.
BDD had several iterations and even had a Microsoft Certified Professional Exam created for one of its versions. These iterations were each an improvement upon the last until finally, in November 2007, the MDT was released.
Fast forward to the present, and MDT 2013 Update 2 is current at the time of writing. At this point, MDT is essentially System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) "lite". You can backend it with a database, put a web frontend on it, do dynamic actions based on hardware make and model, install previous applications, and much more.
This tool, the MDT, will be the focus of this book. There are other (typically more expensive) solutions out there to be sure, but if one is preparing to perform deployments at scale, MDT should be looked at as it can easily do a lot of manual work and, while it costs nothing, it is supported by Microsoft Support.
Imaging concepts
When we look at utilizing the WIM format and MDT, there are essentially three schools of thought in building what is commonly termed a golden image in deployment. These are the thick, thin, and hybrid images. They each have their merits and rather than adhere to a single one, I tend to view each as a tool in the deployment toolbox. So depending on the situation and customer needs, I would recommend one over another:
Sometimes a thick image is the best option due to logistics. Imagine you need to deploy Windows to systems on a submarine or a cruise ship. Sending media containing a thick image by freight/helicopter might be an answer versus deployment from a share.
Thin Image: A thin image is (as one might assume) an image that contains nothing except a patched operating system. It is quick to deploy, but customization post-deployment can take quite some time, even by automated scripts. This is a minimalist approach but has merit when you need an image of the smallest size or only a few diverging applications from a golden base image.Hybrid Image: A hybrid image is an image that contains a patched operating system and core business applications, typically applications for which the business has a site license. Typically, some limited customizations occur post deployment with these images as part of a task sequence.Applications, drivers and packages are three components that can be included in the image, depending on type of image. These are defined clearly in the MDT documentation and UI, but need introduction here:
Imaging tools
The following tools are used for imaging:
