The machine on which you install MDT will
be called either a technician machine (when you're installing MDT on a
desktop OS) or a deployment server (when you're installing MDT on a
server class operating system). Whether you have a technician machine
or a deployment server, the steps for installing, configuring, and
using MDT are identical. But before you dive in and start installing
MDT to create your technician machine/deployment server, consider these
three things:
Your technician machine/deployment server must meet the minimum hardware requirements.
MDT requires additional software that needs to be installed before MDT will be usable.
You should know which OSs you can install MDT on and which OSs MDT can deploy.
In this section we'll focus on setting up the
technician machine/deployment server, including the hardware and
software requirements, and explain which operating system would work
best on the deployment server and why.
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Working with OS deployment puts you in a seat where
you need control. You must spend time figuring out naming for folders,
scripts, task sequences, applications, and so on. The naming convention
does not need to be perfect, but it must be logical and easy to
understand. One case we recall was a company that had drivers for more
than 20 different models of PCs. The company imported every single
driver into the root folder Out-Box Drivers. That approach
almost worked for 2 or 3 months—then they had problems. They added new
drivers for a new model, but what they did not know was that the vendor
removed support in the new driver for older models, although the Plug
and Play (PNP) number was the same. The only solution was to do what
they should have done from the beginning: pick just the drivers they
needed and put them in a nice, clean folder structure. Somehow, it
always comes back when you try to cheat...
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1. Hardware Requirements
The Microsoft bare minimum hardware requirements are
fairly low, and if you install MDT 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 you
have already passed all the minimum requirements since Windows Server
2008 R2 has higher requirements than MDT has, and we highly recommend
that you install MDT 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2. If you install MDT
2010 on another operating system, the minimum hardware requirements are
the following:
Moving past the minimum requirements, think about
this—installing MDT on a server doesn't burden the server. Even
creating images for deployment doesn't take a lot of juice. But when
clients connect across the network and start pulling those big image
files from the hard drive—that's where the server is going to take a
performance hit. A server has four subsystems you must take into
account: the processor, memory, disk performance, and network
interface. The most important subsystems for a deployment server are
disk performance and the network interface. The processor and memory
are not as heavily utilized by MDT's deployment process. We suggest
spending your money on high disk performance and (depending on how many
machines you plan to deploy concurrently) possibly multiple network
interfaces. We recommend the following, at minimum, for your minimum
hardware:
1.4 GHz processor or better
2 GB of RAM or more
2 disk sets (RAID 1 for your OS and RAID 5 for your data) with at least 150 GB of disk space to store your images
A
gigabit network card (multiple NICs if you plan on deploying a lot of
machines at the same time, but that will require that you use teamed
NICs)
2. Software Requirements
The installation of MDT 2010 requires installing the
Windows Automated Installation Kit 2.0 (WAIK), also referred to as the
Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7. MDT utilizes the
WAIK's tools for capturing, applying, and maintaining images.
There are two versions of MDT 2010 Update 1: one 32
bit and one 64 bit. You select the version that matches your OS
version. The WAIK is both 32 and 64 bit at the same time if you
download it from Microsoft Download. But from within the Deployment
Workbench you will see that there are two downloads: one 32-bit and one
64-bit. When you download the WAIK from Microsoft Download, it is a
complete package that works on many operating systems; it also has
Windows Deployment Services included for Windows Server 2003. When you
download the WAIK from within MDT 2010 Update 1, you get only the parts
that you need (WinPE, WSIM, and the tools). That's why it's in most
cases faster to first install MDT and then use the Components tab to
download the rest of the tools you need.
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We recommend that you first install MDT 2010 Update
1 and then, from the Components node, download and install the WAIK
toolkit. When you choose this route, downloading will be faster, since
you download just the parts from the kit that are needed. If you
download the complete kit, you will notice that there are no 32- and
64-bit versions. The full download version is both 32 and 64 bit, so
you will save time downloading the WAIK from the Components node.
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The WAIK 2.0 has software requirements as well: .NET Framework 2.0 or later and MSXML 6.0 or later have to be installed before
you can install the WAIK. Not to worry; the required software for the
WAIK is included in the WAIK download, so you won't have to waste time
searching for it. And if you choose to set up a deployment server using
Windows Server 2008 or later, both the .NET Framework and MSXML are
built in.
3. Supported Operating Systems
The operating system of a technician machine may be
either Windows Vista SP1 or Windows 7. The OS of a deployment server
can be Windows Server 2003 SP2 (the Windows AIK documentation states
2003 SP1, but that's incorrect), Windows Server 2008, or Windows Server
2008 R2. We recommend an OS that supports Server Message Block (SMB)
2.0 (Vista, Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008 R2). SMB 2.0 will speed
up the deployment process since it handles larger file transfers better
than SMB 1.0.
Installing MDT on a server class OS such as Windows
Server 2008 R2 allows you to easily integrate Windows Deployment
Service (WDS) and MDT or Configuration Manager and MDT . Even though MDT 2010 can be installed
on client class and older server class OSs, we strongly recommend
installing MDT on the latest server operating system, which will give
you better performance, better scalability, and more flexibility.
The following operating systems are supported by MDT 2010 Update 1 for deployment:
