Mick Huxley

It’s all about deployment

Over the last few months the amount of content coming out of Microsoft about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 has shifted from features and functionality to deployment tools.  This shift continues to the push to move from sector based deployment tools such as Ghost and onto dynamic offline serviceable images using the Windows Imaging (WIM) file format.  The tools of choice for deployment, from Microsoft, are the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) and System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007.  Both tools use a common set of files and SCCM simply adds additional functionality above MDT.

So to start.. MDT is basically an integrated MMC for deployment, it is the glue which brings together Windows PE, Windows Automated Installation Toolkit (WAIK) and Windows Deployment Services to provide a consolidated deployment platform for Windows client, server and Office 2007.

Personally, I’ve been using MDT since the start of the year and have built a Windows Server 2008 SOE using the toolkit.  I initially selected the tool based on the marketing that Microsoft had been pushing and after a long learning process am glad I did.  The MDT is provided as a solution accelerator, which are designed to get applications working quickly and for the most part MDT did have me deploying operating systems in a few hours, unfortunately customising the images took considerably longer.  I will post about this later.

As Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 roles towards RTM the deployment focus is an interesting move from Microsoft.  Rather then simply launching the OS and leaving IT Pros to work out deployment paths, deployment guidance is being pushed already, during the RC phase, to get IT Pros thinking not just about the product, but about how to deploy it within the Enterprise from RTM.  A good move by Microsoft as many organisations are still slashing costs in the current economic climate, so providing a consolidated deployment platform at no cost gives that added boost to Organisations considering the upgrade to Windows 7.  It also gives Microsoft a potential sales boost soon after RTM as Organisations may not see the need to wait until SP1, as has previously been the case.

What you may want to wait for though is MDT 2010 or more specifically the User State Migration Tool Version 4.  Currently in beta, MDT 2010 and USMT4 will really drive down deployment times in the desktop space.  USMT 3, available today, works by coping all of the user data off the system partition to either a network share, different partition, different hard disk, USB device etc… and then following deployment, copying the files back.  This adds a considerable amount of time to the deployment for the copy.  USMT 4 introduces a hard file links, so rather the copying the data of the disk, a table is constructed pointing to the sectors of the disk containing the data and they the data is left in place.  Following the OS deployment the links are simply updated into the file table and the data appears back in the same folder structure.  A really cool feature as it reduces the deployment time.