Windows MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit)

[bcredeur97]

Hello, I have a pretty large question but I'm not really sure if this is the place to ask it, or if anyone here would know. So rather than waste time writing up something big and have no one reply, does anyone here know about/has used Windows MDT for doing a large deployment?

 

If you have some experience with this, please reply, I'll quote/ask you afterwards!

[techyluke]

At work we use Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM for short) 2012 R2 with MDT to image our devices, very good bits of software! Helps reduce imaging times, by reducing the amount of interaction needed!

 

You don't need SCCM to use MDT but you will need at least Windows Server 2008 R2 with at least the WDS and DHCP roles, lots of steps involved to set it all up, but I can answer some questions otherwise Google is your friend!

[bcredeur97]

4 hours ago, techyluke said:

At work we use Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM for short) 2012 R2 with MDT to image our devices, very good bits of software! Helps reduce imaging times, by reducing the amount of interaction needed!

 

You don't need SCCM to use MDT but you will need at least Windows Server 2008 R2 with at least the WDS and DHCP roles, lots of steps involved to set it all up, but I can answer some questions otherwise Google is your friend!

well also at work.. we don't have a ton of devices(ok, 300 is a lot but we do them in cycles of 150 and with a team of several people so it's not /awful/ lol), but we certainly have enough for imaging to be a bit of headache. 

 

We'd usually use clonezilla and just make a master image on one of the machines and use that hard drive image to duplicate it onto the other machines, but this is beginning to be a problem with the modern UEFI systems and just weird issues we are encountering... that all point to the imaging being our problem. 

But anyway... my main question is: All we really need to do (for now) is create a master .wim image on a "master" machine (i.e. no worries about injecting drivers and software... it'll already be there in the image... but what seems to not be super clear is, how do you take that .wim image and create say, a USB drive with it to clone the other machines with it? From what I understand you're supposed to make an actual windows installer from the image you get and that installs windows and then puts whatever software you had on it, onto the target machines... 

 

Or is my understanding not correct? 

Basically all we want to do is making imaging as simple as possible. We always have time to make a master image, and all of our machines are personalized per-user. we don't use active directory or any of that... It's all super simple (And probably not very... umm... secure but that isn't my decision (yet)) lol. So if you know of something, that would be super helpful! 

I want to push for something that makes this a bit more simple... (SmartDeploy is a really cool program for this!) but I'd still like to understand the Microsoft method. I have a lot to learn...

[bcredeur97]

it's stuff like this I wish they would teach in College when you go for a degree in Systems Administration.... lol 

 

but no we'll just learn how to use the SAP front end... it's fine.  (I graduate this semester... sigh)

 

I still have the "im just an intern" excuse but won't for long! lol