MDT 2013 Windows 10 and the MSP Part 1

I am relatively new to the MDT scene. I did use it before on a project to deploy around 60 Windows 7 machines but, knowing what I know now, I really got the wrong end of what MDT is all about.

Recently I had another project to deploy an amount of machines, in deployment terms a small number (20) but in laziness terms, I didn’t want to walk around 20 computers manually installing things.

Of course WDS (or RIS) has been around since the good old days of Windows 2000 but it doesn’t suit every scenario, and hopefully by the end of this article you will be as much a convert to MDT as I am, because as you will see, MDT is much, much more than an alternative to WDS.

Installing

I am using Windows Server 2016 with Desktop Experience.

Once you have installed your OS you will need to enable the WDS Role.

You can do that from an elevated PowerShell Window.

Add-WindowsFeature –Name WDS –IncludeAllSubFeature –IncludeManagementTools

Make sure you have named your server before moving on.

There is no direct way to use PowerShell to complete the initial configuration of WDS, so we need to turn to WDSUtil.

On my Server I have an E drive ready to store all our WDS/MDT data.

WDSUTIL /Initialize-Server /Server:LAB-MDT0 /RemInst:"e\RemoteInstall"

The last thing to configure in WDS is the PXE Response, so that WDS will respond to any PXE booted clients on our network.

WDSUTIL /Set-Server /answerclients:all

To use MDT you need to download a few things.

• Deployment Toolkit
• Windows 10 ADK

You will need to install both of these. Note that the ADK may take a long time to download the relevant things during it’s installation.

Once installed i suggest pinning the Deployment Workbench to your taskbar as you will be using it, a lot.

Now we can move on to customising our environment in Part 2.