I am not sure if I am confused as to the purpose of MDT.
We need to deploy a standard Windows 7 build to about 100 new computers, and more as time goes on.
Having followed a whole bunch of documentation, tutorials and white-papers etc, it seems that MDT will always go through the full processes of
- installing windows
- installing applications
Whereas what we need is a simple "take image of reference machine" followed by "clone image onto target". This should be much faster than the full installation routines followed by MDT.
Should I be doing something else with the captured WIM from MDT? Can I simply put it into WDS somehow as a "ready to copy" image?
Best Answer
Before you capture your WIM, configure your reference computer with whatever applications you want to have pre-installed. When the WIM is applied to a target, all that is left to do is join it to the domain and apply any updates.
With that said, the beauty of using MDT (and by extension, SCCM) is that you can create separate application packages that can be updated independently of the OS. Adding/removing/updating applications doesn't require a new image build every time. In exchange, you increase the time it takes to deploy an image to a target.
For us, the ability to keep applications separate from the OS image has made management of applications and images MUCH easier, but if you're in a situation where you have identical configurations for ALL machines and only do image rebuilds on an infrequent basis, then rolling it all together would be a better option for you.