There are a lot of good guides and information about using the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 to deploy Windows 7 or to “Upgrade” from Windows XP to Windows 7. You have the Quick Start Guides in the MDT Documentation. You have some screen casts and training material like the Deployment CD and a lot of other pages explaining those steps.

Even if Microsoft doesn’t really like to hear this, but out there is still a whole bunch of existing Windows XP Installations. Some of them might consider going to Windows 7 quite soon (soon in terms of within the next 12 months). And I personally like Windows 7 and think it is a very good replacement of Windows XP but let’s face it. A lot of companies will stay on Windows XP at least for a while. Yes it’s old but it is also quite stable. It’s well tested  running for several years supporting almost any recent and current hardware and if you don’t need one of the features only available in Windows 7 for Business reason a “Because it’s kewl” probably won’t convince your boss ;-)

So you might come into the situation where you would need to support the Deployment of new computers with Windows XP and Windows 7, refreshing (and replace) computers running Windows XP and Windows 7 and be able to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 (using a Wipe and Load approach).

And here is the best part. All this can be done out of the box with MDT 2010. All the scripts will work no matter if you deploy Windows XP or Windows 7 (yes, also Windows Vista ;-) ). And they have built-in logic to decide what to do depending on the current or future OS. If you just go through the supplied Guides and replace all parts of  Windows 7 with Windows XP you are quite good to go. OK, you might want to have a look on some MDT 2008 guides to dealing with some XP specifics but the general deployment will work. There is actually only one thing missing in the Documentation (Or better to say I wasn’t able to find it). And that’s the User State Migration Tool (USMT) Support for Windows XP. MDT 2008 used the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) 1.1 and with it USMT 3. USMT 3 supports the capture of User/Computer data from Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista and is able to restore it onto Windows XP and Windows Vista. Now MDT 2010 requires WAIK 2 which includes USMT 4. This added support for Windows 7 and some nice features like hardlinks or offline capture but it dropped the restore support for Windows XP. You can still capture from Windows XP (SP3!) but you can only restore on Windows Vista or Windows 7.

But luckily the MDT Developers included support for USMT 3. The first thing you would need is to download the Installation Files for USMT 3. You can also download them in the “Components” Node of the Information Center of the MDT 2010 Deployment Workbench. When downloaded just select them and click on the Browse Button to get the downloaded files. Then drop them in the “Tools” folder of MDT 2010. Preferably put the x86 msi file into the “x86” subfolder and the x64 msi into the “x64” subfolder. Use either directly the Tools Folder in your Deployment Share if it has been created already but you might also consider putting them into the “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit\Templates\Distribution\Tools” folder as this will be used as a Template for new Deployment Shares. During the deployment the scripts are now able to use USMT 3 and 4.

The second thing is a bit more tricky. On default MDT 2010 will now only use USMT 3 if the Target OS defined in the Task Sequence is Windows XP and the Deployment Type is not Replace (it assumes you always “replace” a XP computer with a Windows Vista/Windows 7 computer) and the deployment hasn’t been started from SCCM.This said, in Litetouch only a typical refresh scenario using the standard Client Task Sequence from MDT 2010 executed via LiteTouch.vbs from a Windows XP with Target OS Windows XP will use USMT 3. On SCCM it will simply use the assigned USMT Package. So in SCCM you only need to take care about this if you would like to be able to use USMT 3 and USMT 4 from the same Task Sequence which you should only consider if absolutely necessary. But it would be possible.

However there is also a new Property in MDT 2010 called “USMT3”. If this is set to “YES” (e.g. hardcoded in the customsettings.ini) it will override this default behavior and always use USMT 3 except if the current OS is Windows 7. This is great if your default OS is Windows XP. But you need to be a bit careful if you start upgrading to Windows 7 as USMT 3 isn’t able to restore the Data on Windows 7.

One way of handling this intermediate scenario where your default OS is still Windows XP but you already started the Windows 7 Deployment could be handled using the Deployment Database. In the customsettings.ini add the “USMT3=YES” to the “[Default]” section. Then set this section as last in the List of Priorities. This would take care that it will always default to USMT 3 if nothing else is set. Then you can have additional sections to query the Deployment Database for Computer or Location (or other) specific settings. If you now would like to configure a single computer or Location to be upgraded to Windows 7 you would simply set this property in the database to “NO” (Need a handy FrontEnd for this?). During the Deployment this will be evaluated dynamically from the Gather process and as the property USMT3 has been configured as “First Value  Wins” (OK, it’s actually overwrite=False but it sounds better) it will only default to USMT 3 if no other value have been configured. Your cs.ini could now look like

[Settings]
Priority=…, ComputerSpecificSettings, …, LocationSpecificSettings, …, Default

[Default]
USMT3=YES
…

[ComputerSpecificSettings]
SQLServer=…

For sure there are several other ways to achieve this so take it as an example. After some time your default OS might turn into Windows 7 and you would need to swap the logic making NO the default but still giving you the possibility to set single Computers to YES and maintaining the possibility to still make Windows XP Deployments.

Finally, if you need to support Windows XP and Windows 7 from one Deployment Share be sure to make heavy use of the new Folders feature. With MDT 2010 you can add as many folders as you like. Split everything up at least into OS and architecture and then create Selection Profiles to combine all the different Folders per OS/Architecture. This will help you keeping them separated from each other. There are  also some known issues with MDT 2010 you should be aware of. Johan Arwidmark just posted them on his Blog (http://www.deployvista.com) so no need to repeat them again ;-)

UDPATE: Tim Minter just wrote a really great article about Understanding USMT in MDT 2010.