Using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

Microsoft Development Toolkit 2010 (MDT 2010) is Microsoft's best solution for highvolume Windows 7 deployment projects. It reduces complexity and increases standardization by allowing you to deploy a hardware and software baseline to all users and computers. With standard baselines, you can manage the computing environment more easily, spend less time managing and deploying computers, and spend more time on mission-critical tasks.

MDT 2010 provides automation tools and guidance that help reduce labor and increase reliability by producing standardized configurations. It provides fully developed processes for you to do the following:

• Determine which applications can be redeployed on new systems and start a process for packaging or scripting those applications so that you can reinstall them quickly and consistently without user intervention.
• Create an imaging process to produce a standard enterprise image of Windows 7 to aid in configuration management and to speed deployments.
• Establish a process for capturing user state from existing computers and for restoring user state on the newly deployed computers.
• Provide a method for backing up the current computer before deploying Windows 7.
• Provide an end-to-end process for the actual deployment of the new computers. The guidance includes Lite Touch and Zero Touch Installations.

Although you can certainly undertake a high-volume deployment project without MDT 2010, that approach is discouraged. This is because without MDT 2010, you must develop your own development and deployment processes. You also must define your own best practices and develop your own automation. By using MDT 2010 as your deployment framework, you save potentially hundreds of hours that you would otherwise spend writing scripts, writing answer files, developing images, and so on. MDT 2010 handles most scenarios intrinsically, and you can easily extend MDT 2010 for additional scenarios. You can even use MDT 2010 with most third-party deployment technologies. This tutorial assumes you'll be using MDT 2010.

MDT 2010 has two major components: the documentation and the solution framework. The following sections describe these components in more detail. Earlier versions of MDT provided detailed planning guidance and job aids. However, due to the overwhelming size of the documentation in MDT, Microsoft has reduced the documentation in MDT to essential technical guidance only. Additionally, MDT now includes quick-start guides that provide endto- end instructions for Lite Touch Installation (LTI) and Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) deployment. The section titled "Planning High-Volume Deployment" later in this tutorial describes how to plan high-volume deployment projects in lieu of the MDT planning documentation.

Note Install MDT 2010 to view its documentation as compiled help (.chm) files. After installing MDT 2010, click Start, point to All Programs, select Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and then click Microsoft Deployment Help. To learn how to install MDT 2010, see the section titled "Installing the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit," later in this tutorial. You can download printer-ready documentation from the Microsoft Download Center at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads.