Deploying and Administering Windows Vista® Bible

Chapter 7. Using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 (formerly known as the BDD) provides guidance on the deployment of Windows systems. You can use it to leverage a number of Microsoft tools and scripts to address such tasks as establishing a lab environment for the development and testing of imaging servers. You can create automated tasks for the installation of Windows Vista and desired applications, create custom images, and even automate the population of key values that dictate how an installation is to take place on a computer by computer basis.

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) contains a substantial amount of guidance and documentation on its own. To help illustrate the value of this documentation, this chapter provides a summary description of each of the included documents before going into a step-by-step walkthrough covering how you can configure and make use of MDT in your own environment. Finally, we cover some third-party tools you can look to as alternatives to the MDT.

Introducing the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is made up of both documentation and tools designed to help tie together several different utilities and scripts. These utilities and scripts are collected here in order to provide a cohesive end to end solution for deploying Windows systems.

Note

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008 is available from Microsoft's Web site at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3bd8561f-77ac-4400-a0c1-fe871c461a89 ...