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The third part in this series about MDT (Microsoft deployment toolkit) covers the basics of Windows deployment.
MDT has two main sections within the Workbench: Information Center and Deployment Shares. Information Center contains links to documentation, online links (news), and components, where you download software. The other section is where you can create, populate, and manage deployment shares.
MDT 2012 workbench
The second part of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) series describes all the things you need to get started with OS deployment.
Before you even bother installing MDT, I suggest you install the MDT prerequisites listed in the following table, in order. For XP, you also need to install PowerShell.
| Requirements | Size | Download Link |
| WAIK 3.0 | 1.3GB | KB3AIK_EN.ISO |
| WAIK Supplement for Windows 7 SP1 only | 1.3GB | waik_supplement_en-us.iso |
| PowerShell 2.0 – new since MDT Update 1 | 1MB | Management framework (for XP only) |
| Configuration Manager 2007 toolkit | 1MB | ConfigMrgTools.msi |
| MDT print-ready docs | Word versions of the help file | |
| MDT 2010 update 1 | 1GB | MDT |
| %temp% drive space | 5GB | n/a |
This series in three parts gives an overview of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to get started quickly with this free OS deployment toolset.
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is Microsoft’s core tool to automate installing a Windows OS for desktops, servers, and portable or even virtual machines. Ironically, the first thing to about MDT is that it is an iceberg product; underneath the water is 1GB of code from Microsoft called the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK, pronounced “wake”). The WAIK does the bulk of the heavy lifting. MDT itself is a lightweight (25MB) standalone Microsoft management console (mmc) based tool with a comprehensive deployment guide in help-file format.
MDT and WAIK tools
In this second part of two I will describe some technical details of ManageEngine Desktop Central 7 and give an overview of the tool's systems management features.
Desktop Central 7 uses a role-based access control (RBAC) motif in which you can log into the system as a full-fledged administrator or as one of a series of dedicated sub-administrative roles, including the following:
Once you are logged in as an administrator, Desktop Central offers you a plethora of administrative action options for managed devices; some of these are shown in the screenshot below.
Desktop Central 7 administrative options
This is the second of a two-part guide about OS deployment tools. Today's post focusses on driver deployment tools.
If you need to deploy a build to more than one model of hardware, you are going to have to download, install and manage dozens of device drivers. There are three challenges at this point: identifying all the unknown devices, installing the correct driver for each, and then capturing all the details. The result forms a master driver repository to document the drivers for each model that you import to MDT or SCCM. As there is nothing in the WAIK or MDT to help, I’ve collected my own toolkit. I use NirSoft’s DevManView for identifying devices and Double Driver to help create a backup repository.
Driver deployment tool DevManView
This is the first of a two-part guide to collecting several OS deployment tools.
When you begin the journey into learning how to deploy a Microsoft Operating System, you quickly realise that although Microsoft provides tools that improve all the time, they leave two main gaps: WIM management and driver management. Before continuing, I want to define the core steps of any OS build:
The first task of creating a “build”, given business specifications, is to install the raw OS that you have configured to meet that specification. You then capture this as the baseline image. You can do this capture in several ways, but the easiest is free: Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT).
This post is a short tutorial for the alternative WPKG client WPKG-GP. It allows you to remotely install software via Group Policy.
Now that we have configured WPKG on the server side, all that remains to be done, is to tell our client system to run the WPKG script (with administrator privileges). WPKG should then manage our software as per our config files. Whereas the WPKG project does provide a client, I prefer to use the alternative WPKG-GP client.
The reason I prefer WPKG-GP is that it hooks into the startup process via Group Policy extensions, and runs WPKG before users have a chance to login, so you don’t need to worry about applications being open when you are trying to upgrade them.
Once you downloaded WPKG-GP, run the setup, and install all components. For simplicity we will enable local policies, although it is possible to configure WPKG-GP via Group Policy. During the setup process you will need to browse to the file share where you copied the WPKG files to. The final screen of the installer will ask you for an account that has permissions to connect to the WPKG share. I suggest creating a dedicated account for WPKG for this. Don’t forget to give this account read access to your WPKG share!
(4 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...WPKG is an Open Source software deployment tool that allows you to install software, upgrade and remove applications on remote Windows computers.
The great thing about WPKG is that it doesn’t require any infrastructure other than an SMB network share, oh, and it’s free! To follow this introductory tutorial to WPKG, head over to the download page to get the latest version of WPKG, unzip the file and copy hosts.xml, packages.xml, profiles.xml and wpkg.js to C:\WPKG or a location of your choice. You should also share this folder, as you will need to access it over the network.
The wpkg.js file is the main engine of WPKG. It first looks through the various XML configuration files, and then runs any required commands to install, upgrade or remove software from your client systems.
So-called profiles are defined in profiles.xml. A profile basically contains a list of software packages that will be installed on the remote system.
(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5) Loading ...In my last article, we walked through the setup of Windows Deployment Services and deployed Windows 7 to our client systems. In this article we will build upon this setup, by making these deployments happen in an unattended manner.
Unattended deployment of Windows 7 means that you won’t have to wait around clicking ‘next’ all the time – you can just start the deployment off and forget about it!
We automate the deployments by loading ‘answer files’ into Windows Deployment Services (WDS). As the name suggests, these files contain the answers to setup questions along with the ability to set a number of additional options too. Answer files are in an XML format, and generated by the Windows System Image Manager application. In order to obtain the Windows System Image Manager you will need to download and install the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) – although it’s quite a hefty download at around 1GB!
There are two answer files that we will need to create, as we have two stages of our deployment – the WDS client from the boot image and then the main Windows 7 installation image. Windows System Image Manager will need to create a catalogue file beside the WIM file, so copy the install.wim from your Windows 7 media to somewhere with write access (thisstep will fail if you attempt to open them directly from a DVD!). The WIM file is located in the sources folder of the Windows 7 installation media. (D:\sources\install.wim)
In this first article in a series of four, we will setup and configure Windows Deployment Services (WDS) to deploy Windows 7 across our network.
As a systems administrator, your time is probably quite precious, you don’t really have time to be juggling DVD’s around and watching progress bars to install operating systems and applications on each workstation. Over the next few articles I will take you through deploying operating systems and applications automatically over your network.
There are a few prerequisites that we must have in place before we start with this walkthrough. Firstly, we will need a functioning Active Directory setup, with DNS and DHCP. The server we use for Windows Deployment Services will also require an NTFS partition for its file store. Our client systems need to support PXE (Network) booting, and finally we will require some installation media to load onto our deployment server –in my examples I will be using the 32bit Windows 7 SP1 DVD.
We start by adding the Windows Deployment Services role to your server – click ‘Add roles’ from server manager, select Windows deployment services, and install both of the role services. You should reboot your server after the installation of the WDS role.
WMI Explorer allows you to browse WMI classes, objects and their properties and execute any WMI query.
This is part three of a three part series of articles covering two great WMI tools, the second and final tool being WMI Explorer.
WMI Explorer v1.10 is another lightweight (at 533KB), portable tool. To demonstrate its abilities I need to use WMI to find something I don’t already know and without using any books or the web. My example is to list the games I have installed and the path. The first step is to connect to a different namespace, as in the screenshot below.
WMI Explorer – Connecting to different namespaces
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5) Loading ...This is part two of a three part series of articles covering two great WMI tools, the first tool being Microsoft's free WMI Code Creator.
WMI Code Creator is a tiny (300KB) Microsoft tool available here. To demonstrate its features, the code snippet below is for querying a machine’s model and gives us enough info to start using the tool.
strComputer = "."
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strQuery="SELECT * from Win32_ComputerSystem"
Set col=GetObject("WinMgmts://" & strComputer & "/root/cimv2").ExecQuery(strQuery)
For Each WMIProperty in col
PCModel = WMIProperty.Model
First, I need to select the CIMV2 namespace and then find the win32_computersystem class in the class drop-down box. Without reference to a huge book or the internet, you would struggle to discover the properties in the class without perhaps writing a script. Code creator makes this trivial, with the click of a single button which lists all properties. The model is just one property of many, as you can see in figure 2 below:
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...This is the first part of a series of three articles covering two great WMI tools, introduces how System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) uses WMI in OS deployment task-sequences.
Recently I had to use SCCM to deploy a Windows XP image with support for seventeen models. To achieve this aim, a major requirement was to check the target hardware was indeed one of the seventeen models supported before pushing a 6GB image to it.
Briefly, SCCM performs OS deployment by preparing a blank disk, writing an image to the disk and injecting appropriate drivers using a template of commands in sequence. Microsoft cunningly calls this a task-sequence. To provide filtering logic, each step within a task-sequence has an options tab where you can add a WMI query. This allows you to use WMI queries which let you target machines very easily but you need to discover the exact model string for the query to work.
In this article you will learn what the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) is, why it is useful, and how to install the software in Windows Server 2008.
Regardless of whether you love or hate the Internet Explorer Web browser, one thing is for sure: Microsoft sure gives us administrators plenty of flexibility in how we deploy and manage the application. In Windows Server 2008 R2 we have over 1,000 Group Policy settings to customize IE behavior.
NOTE: In Windows Server 2008 R2, the Group Policy paths to the Internet Explorer maintenance settings are Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Internet Explorer and User Configuration\Windows Settings\Internet Explorer Maintenance
Some of the representative IE customizations that Windows administrators may want to specify include the following:
This second part of the review of the Windows software deployment tool PDQ Deploy Pro covers the scheduling and targeting features.
The deadline for this contest is May 27, 2011. If you want to have a chance to win one of eight PDQ Deploy Pro licenses, each worth $249 USD, please send an email with the subject “PDQ Deploy Pro” to .
In my last post, I described PDQ Deploy Pro’s Installers, which are essentially software deployment packages. Today, I will cover three other important PDQ Deploy Pro concepts: Schedules, Targets, and Deployments.
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