Gone are the days of endless hours swapping physical media in and out of computers to install first that shiny new Windows Operating System, then all of your needed applications, as well as customizing the Operating System to your liking, applying patches and finally assigning a name to the machine and joining to the domain.

In walks MDT to save your company time and money on both small and large scale deployments.

MDT can be run as a standalone application for deployment processes or it can be incorporated into Microsoft’s Windows Deployment Services for mass deployment of Windows Operating Systems

I have run MDT to deploy out to 30 machines at the same time, with the deployment time running less than one hour from the initial PXE Boot of the machines to the Operating System being up and running with all applications installed. MDT can be setup to be fully automated (from the moment you PXE boot there are no options for the install) or to be more selective with the install process. Including but not limited to: Which version of Windows to install, Architecture type, Applications, and whether or not to join your Domain.

One of the reasons MDT does its job so efficiently is the work done on the back end while setting up the deployment process. MDT uses images of the Operating System to push out during the deployment. These images contain (if you set it up properly beforehand) all necessary drivers for your specific machine deployment and eliminates the need to find that missing driver file for the NIC that prevents you from connecting to the internet.

MDT will also allow you to deploy images of your favorite Windows Server versions to your machines, allowing the same customization of installed applications as well as sever side features that you want enabled when the server Operating System hits the ground running.

MDT is a great option if your user machines are located in remote sites or even if they are off the internet completely. You can setup your image deployment so that it will create an ISO image file, which you can copy to a portable media device (thumb drive, USB Hard Drive, burnable Optical Disc) and then send this device to your remote users. This will allow them to be able to deploy their needed version of Windows Operating System to their machines without ever leaving the comfort of their remote office.

Another option when using MDT is that you can spin up a new machine, applying all settings, applications even local shared files or folders on the new machine. Then create and capture this new machines image up to the Windows Deployment Server and import it into MDT. Once you have the image captured you will be able to deploy it out easily to any machine that is of the exact make/model of the originally imaged machine. This “cookie cutter” deployment works great in environments where all users from the same department are using:

1. Identical Machines
2. Running Identical Applications
3. Require identical settings on their machines

Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit for all of your Windows Operating System deployments will make your life much easier and free up lots of time in your busy and hectic schedule, allowing you to focus on other issues that plague your users.