Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

Setup

For most Windows users, the setup process is something of a black box. You run setup and stuff happens and then voilá, you have a Windows installation. For the deployment engineer however, the setup process is where the magic happens. MDT manipulates the setup by providing variables along the process, to customize the resulting image for the target machine.

MDT does this by inserting variables into the Unattend.xml file for Windows setup. Some of these variables can even be provided dynamically based on queries using a technique known as UserExit scripts. These are used to determine a variables property based on something such as the organizational unit (OU) of a user account, the location of the machine on the network (usually determined ...