Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 – Update 1 – UDI (User Driven Installation) First Look
I started writing this blog a week ago and just couldn’t find the time to finish it, as it turns out my girlfriend would prefer I spend time with her instead of writing a blog post. Then I decided I would make use of my time on a return flight home and finish the post. So thanks to Hyper-V, Windows Live Writer and good battery life on my laptop, here is a post on a first look at UDI in MDT 2010 Update 1 (Beta).
This will show an XP to Windows 7 refresh of a Hyper-V virtual machine. I haven’t done any customizations to UDI other than providing the Domain to join and a list of a few Organization Units to pick from. I’ll show you how to customize the UDI interface in coming blog posts. First, let me show you the options I’ve configured in the UDI Wizard Designer to get the basic process to run.
Computer Page
We’ve configured the Domain of Deployment.com, we’ve added a few OU’s that can be chosen to place the computer into, we’ve disabled the Workgroup field and we’ve changed the default selection to be the Domain.
User Configuration Page
We’ve unchecked “Allow user to add additional accounts to the local Administrators group.
Language Page
We’ve set the Timezone to Central Time.
After you make changes to the xml, make sure to save the file and then update your distribution points to reflect those changes.
Lets kick off an OSD advertisement in Windows XP and see what the process looks like as it actually runs.\
Here we have a few non-mandatory task sequences available to be executed, we are going to choose the Windows 7 x86 UDI task sequence.
Here we have our task sequence starting to execute:
Next we have the Welcome screen of the UDI wizard presented to the user:
Next we have our pre-flight checks being run and passed:
Next we have the Computer Details page which allows us to name the machine, join a domain or workgroup, along with provide credentials to join the domain:
Next we have the screen where we can set the local administrator password:
Next we can set the Time Zone and keyboard layouts:
Next we can chose the image, select the volume and the windows target directory, note that you can optionally select a format here:
Next we can select the applications to install, here is where you could also make applications mandatory by configuring the pane in the UDI wizard designer or just allowing users to choose from a list of applications, or even use package mapping to detect what was installed on the machine.
Here is our demo, we don’t have any applications configured as I wanted to show you the bare minimum to get UDI going.
Finally we have a summary screen showing the options that have been configured:
The process starts and it’s staging WinPE to the disk:
Here we are in WinPE, running an offline User State Capture (thank you USMT 4.0):
Next we apply the image to disk:
Next we Setup Windows and install the ConfigMgr client:
Install applications if applicable (none in our demo here, so this step went through very quickly):
Restore User State:
Here is the deployment finished and we are presented with a summary screen. (I really like this):
There you have it, that’s the basic overview of UDI running an XP to Win7 refresh and what it looks like. Looks like it’ll be very promising!