MDT – Part 8

Imaging Made Simple – My Final Thoughts

MDT is a great tool that you can do many things with it besides what I have demonstrated to you. This is a very basic setup. You can deploy applications with it. You can set it up to be an application installer for your desktops if you want. MDT can be used in small shops along very large shops and the hardware required is not much.

Hardware

From a network perspective always plug the server into a 1Gb minimum or even 10Gb if possible. I found even if the machines were running less than 1Gb as long as the server has the throughput then things will work great. NVMe drives would be another area to put money into your imaging server for the deployment share.

My Setup

In my setup I am running KVM on Fedora server with an NVMe drive on a whitebox that a good friend of mine put together for me. It has 32gb of ram .

Past Setups

From a development station I would use a single HyperV host to be my work station to create the task and images for deployment. Then from a production standpoint I would where my MDF was located at, on my VMware environment setup I would just have a MDT\WDS server at the location. For my locations that did not have the infrastructure I would use an older desktop with no more than 4 gigs or ram with MDT\WDS installed on it and could run many deployments at the same time.

My Personal Feelings

I am not a fan of creating a GOLDEN image for my devices I prefer to have the latest ISO from Microsoft and deploy a fresh copy of Windows every time. I let MDT deploy my applications based on the use case and let Active Directory and Group Policy setup my clients how I want. In the past I would create an image and set the settings, and copy the profile and then capture. This was fine back in the day but it was the worse thing when you would spend all day creating the image and then deploy it and find something was wrong with your image and have to start all over again. Again these are my thoughts and process I follow to make my job much easier. I am not a master at MDT but have used it for many years and find this setup is solid and does work without any issues. Till Next Time, God Bless you all.