First, let’s think about what you are going to need to get going:
- Technician Computer (mine is a Dell Optiplex 740 running Windows 7 Enterprise)
- Student Computer
- Windows 7 (or your OS) installation media
- Downloads…
Begin by installing the above programs on your Technician Computer. When you are done, launch the Deployment Workbench.
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- This is the MDT 2010
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- Create a new deployment share
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- Choose where the deployment share will be
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- Name the share, ends with “$” character
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- Describe the share
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- Allow image capture
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- (Optional) Allow user to set admin
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- (Optional) Input product key
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- Click next
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- Now you have a deployment share
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- Under deployment share, right-click “Operating System” then “Import Operating System”
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- Here I select “Full set of source files”, but if you already have a custom .WIM you can select that
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- Click “Browse”
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- Locate your image/installation disk then click “Ok”
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- Name the directory
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- After a while, the OS will be imported
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- Right-click on “Task Sequences” then select “New Task Sequence”
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- Give the task an ID (numbers), name, and description (optional)
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- Select “Sysprep and Capture”
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- Click on the OS
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- If you are using a KMS select “Do not specify a product key at this time”
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- Changes these settings as you like
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- Set a password
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- Now you have a new task sequence
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- Right-click on your share name, and select “Update Deployment Share”
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- I have found that compressing this speeds things up later (optional)
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- Click “Next”
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- The process will run for a while…
Now your technician computer is good to go. There are really two ways to go forward from here, one is to create a bootable device/disk using MDT. What I’ve been doing though is move over to the student machine (laptop) and install then customize the image. This can take a while. I know that this probably isn’t the best way to do this… but it has been pretty efficient.
When I’m done preparing my image – installing every application it will need – I use this trick to capture my image. This will run sysprep and capture your custom .WIM to your technician computer. This image will be the one you use to deploy your OS. You can do so in any number of ways – over your LAN or using a USB/Flash drive (it will need to be large if you installed large applications) to name two that I’ve tried. In the next post I’ll go over these methods of deployment.
