How best to set up MDT developement and production

deploymentmdt-2010

What's your MDT 2010 test and prod setup? What do you consider best practice?

Linked Deployment Shares
Is it best to use linked deployment shares, and replicate from development to production when testing is complete? What about backing out, if something breaks?

Multiple Share Names
Or what about moving the production share name from one deployment share to another, as you add and test more OS versions, drivers, attributes, etc? This might make sense if you weren't able to update boot images as easily – the PXE boot image would always connect to the same sharename, which could be moved around on the server.

Distributed File System DFS)
Does anyone run MDT shares in DFS, or is there no support in the WinPE boot image for DFS shares?

Best Answer

We use a development DP, staging DP and production DP. We do our engineering in the dev DP, and testing from our staging. Once we're ready to support the DP, we replicate from Staging to Production. We haven't really encountered any issues so far.

As for the DFS, not sure. I wanted to take a look into this but I suppose it would largely be determined if WinPE supports DFS namespaces or not.

Related Solutions

How to remove an entry from the registry during an MDT deployment

The steps in the task sequence execute after the local administrator account has logged on and this needs to occur before. I'm not aware of a way around that within the task sequence itself.

You should be able to mount your WIM file and remove those lines using regedit against the registry contained within.

EDIT - I used to mount with dism and use the following command.

reg load HKLM\mounted <mount point>\windows\system32\config\system

Deployment Workbench no longer available after PXE boot

The fact that ipconfig does not return any information indicates that the Windows PE image is missing the NIC driver for your particular model. It turns out that while Windows PE has many network drivers pre-installed, newer models will frequently use NICs that are not part of the base install. This is especially the case with large OEMs, such as Dell.

Technet has an article that explains how to add a driver to an offline Windows PE image using ImageX:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749350(WS.10).aspx

Caution! If your machine uses a multi-tiered NIC (such as Broadcom), you'll need to make sure you download the monolithic driver, which is usually made available from the OEM. Here is a blog that explains this issue:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/configurationmgr/archive/2010/02/09/nic-devices-that-require-a-special-driver-for-winpe-may-cause-a-configmgr-task-sequence-to-fail-if-a-vista-or-newer-os-is-being-deployed-via-an-operating-system-install-package.aspx

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to remove an entry from the registry during an MDT deployment

Deployment Workbench no longer available after PXE boot

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