Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) allows you to automate the deployment of computers in your organization.

Welcome ITProTV, I'm your host Don Pezet. [CROSSTALK] [MUSIC] >> You're watching ITProTV. >> Hello and welcome to another exicting episode here at ITProTV. I'm your host Aubri Spurgin and this is the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. And in this episode, we're going to be taking a look at the in place upgrade with MVT, and we have Mr. Mike Roderick here with us to get us along. How is it going, Mike? >> It's going great, Aubri. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited as always to be here. And yeah, we're gonna take a look at one of the ways we can use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and that is to do an in place upgrade, meaning we are going to leave everything where it is on the system. Let's say we've got a laptop and the hardware meets the minimum requirements of our new operating system. In our case, we're gonna move to Windows 10 version 1809, right? I think the machine that's running currently, it's running Windows 8.1. But the machine itself, the hardware is perfectly fine running Windows 10. I'm not gonna issue new hardware. We could swap out the operating systems, right? Replace Windows 8.1 with Windows 10, leaving all our users' data and information right where it was, all their applications. We don't have to reinstall anything. Hopefully everything goes smoothly, a nice easy process. And the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit or MDT makes the process really easy. Because they have a template, or a task sequence built in for this very procedure. So really it's just a matter of getting things set up. And once you've got it set up, you just go to the the Windows 8.1 machine like in our case, you run a script, and the process just executes and you come back a little bit later. And you're running Windows 10, the fantastic thing >> Wow. >> Sound cool? >> Yeah, sounds so cool, yeah. >> All right, well, let's take it out. Let's see how we can do this. We're gonna start on my server. Server 1 listed here and I did do some of the prerequisites set up already. So let me just point out what I've done we take a look at, I should take it probably right here to my Start menu and we gonna see that I have the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit installed. I can zoom in maybe. I can't really zoom in on the- >> That looks funny, yeah. >> The Start menu. >> Yeah. >> It kinda doubles up there. >> Yeah. >> So I really can't zoom in on that. But you can see the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit has been installed. Primarily, what we're gonna use for this exercise is the Deployment Workbench, one of the components of the Toolkit. You'll also notice I have down here Windows kits. And I can see, and usually that's a good indicator that I've installed the Windows Assessment and Deployment Toolkit. And in order for this all to function, I did need to install the Windows ADK which is appropriate for the version that we're gonna go to. In this case Windows 10 version 1809. They're downloaded from Microsoft the appropriate version of the ADK. I went through the install process, and I chose, and let's just let me show you what I installed here. If I go into C: Program Files, Windows Kits, 10, Assessment and Deployment Kit. Here you'll see that I installed the user state migration tools, as well as the deployment tools, those are check marks when you run through the installation for ADK and the windows pre-installation environment. But even mine and we talked about this and another show we did when we did a show on the user's data migration tool, I think Windows PE is now a separate download. It used to be part of the Windows ADK. It was one of the checkmarks you could check. Well, now it's a separate install. And that Microsoft did this because of the way Windows 10 is updating much faster. They can update these components separately. So if you're used to working with Windows ADK, and you're looking for the check mark for the Windows PE or WinPE. It's not gonna be there, it is a separate download from Microsoft. You'll notice it installs, right? In the same place, so nothing there has changed, you just have to download it separately. That way they can update them separately, so keep that in mind. But anyway so in the end I installed three pieces from the ADK. The deployment tools, USMT, and the Windows PE, all right? Then, I installed the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which again I downloaded from Microsoft. And that's it, that's really, that's the pre-reqs or the setup of the server that you're gonna be running your MDT on. So with that we're gonna go ahead and get started here. I do have, let me just show you, whoops, a Windows 8 machine here. This is the one we want to do the in place upgrade on. Hopefully at the end of this process, it will be running Windows 10, all right? So let's start on Server 1. And I'm gonna launch my Deployment Workbench, all right? So right up here, or I could expand out Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and I could launch the Deployment Workbench there. Either way we'll agree to the UAC, let it use the administrative credentials. And here we have, and let me just get rid of this bar up here for us for a minute. Maybe it'll go away, maybe it won't. There we go [LAUGH] I got our deployment workbench opened up and this is a clean install, right? So there's nothing here yet. So the first thing we're gonna do is create what's called a Deployment Share. This is just a shared folder where I can store the deployment files, right? If I'm going to be installing Windows 10 on those machines doing that in place upgrade then I need the Windows 10 files, right? The source files to install that operating system. All of that has to be accessible from the network from wherever that Windows 8. machine is plugged in, right? It's gonna need to reach out and grab the scripts and the the task sequence and know what to do and then where the source files can come from. Cuz you can get even more complex than what we're getting ready to do here. We can start including applications and lots of other things. It's really a pretty neat process. So I'm gonna right click on Deployment Shares and choose New > Deployment Share, all right? And let's go ahead and call this one, I think I have, actually I'm gonna double check. I got an E drive, I'm gonna put it on that E drive over there. I'm just gonna change the drive letter to E: and I'll leave that default name deployment share you can call it whatever you wanted and different scenarios might warrant different shares. Maybe I have one share that's upgrading to Windows 10 Enterprise and installing certain applications. I got another deployment share that's maybe doing a little different configuration of Windows 10 and different applications. You can create as many of these deployment shares as you need, but name them appropriately so you know what they are. So this is the folder path, I'll click Next. And then for my share name, notice by default. It's just gonna be a hidden share. It's got the dollar sign at the end of it. It just means my users can't find it in their browse lists. It's not a security thing, if they know the name of it, they can get to it directly. But it does hide it from those browse lists, which is definitely helpful. We'll click Next. My description again, I'm just gonna use the default MDT deployment share, and I'll click Next. And then here I've got a list of things that'll gonna be done when doing deployments out of this particular share. Basically setting up rules for this deployment share. And that's what I was saying earlier, you can have different shares that have different sets of rules, or different deployment shares that have different set of rules or procedures for them. I'm gonna uncheck, ask if the computer needs a back up, or if an image should be captured first before it does the upgrade. I'll leave the BitLocker one, just so we can see this process happen. I'll click Next, I get a little summary of everything that I've chosen, and if I'm happy, I'll click Next. And we'll let that run, it won't take very long at all, it's just again creating that share, we should be good to go. You can view the script and you can actually see what it did or if you needed to do this on another server, you could take this and run that script. I'll click Finish, and now I should have on my E drive a deploy to share. There it is, if we take a look at the properties, we'll see that it is shared out as DeploymentShare$. So far, so good? >> Yeah. >> All right, let's do this. The other thing you might wanna do is test that out. All right, I'm gonna go to the Windows A1 machine, open up file explorer, and navigate to \\svr01\deploymentshare$. And sure enough there is the share created, and look at all the files that it put in there, right? I put some root nodes that we'll take advantage of, a bunch of scripts are in here, all the components that it needs to perform these deployments and these upgrades. So good to test it just to make sure that the permissions are right, and that you can connect to that share across the network. All right, so now we've got that set. Next thing we're gonna do, back over to my deployment server, all right? We've created our deployment share, we need to, we don't have any operating system files in here yet. So we're gonna expand out Deployment Share, and there is our MDT Deployment Share on the E drive that we just created. And underneath there, you'll see a node for Operating Systems. I'm gonna make a new folder just for organizational purposes, all right? Click on Operating Systems and choose New Folder. And let's call this one Win Ten enterprise, something like that. And w'ell click Next, and Next, and Finish. All I did was create a little folder here just to organize my resources, right? >> Yes. >> I could have right clicked here and said Import Operating System, now we're clicking on the subfolder and choosing, yeah. >> Okay. >> But maybe you have different operating systems you wanna deploy. And so you can create different folders for each one of those, again, to help keep the source files organized. So we're going say Import Operating System. And then my choices here, either a full set of source files, that means basically I'm copying the source files from a DVD custom image file. If I had created a WIM maybe I'd set up a reference machine, installed applications, all that good stuff and then capture that image, since we have to captured it you made it unique. Or I can use Windows deployment services. I'm running a deployment server, maybe I wanna point it to the deployment server, or the operating system to install on the machine. We're gonna do a full set of source files, so basically a default install. We'll click Next, it says, all right, well where are those source files? I copied them to the local machine to save us a little time. So on my E-drive I've got a folder called WIndows 10 x64, I'm gonna click OK. So now it knows where to get them, and to save a little time I'm gonna choose this option here, Move the files to the deployment share instead of copying them. And normally, you probably have your DVD in the DVD drive. And you wanna copy those files over to the deployment share, all right, or whatever the case may be. In my case, I have already copied the files to the E-drive, right? And if you understand the way file systems work, if I move these from equal and downloads to equal and deployment share, is gonna happen as right? Cuz it's not actually moving anything, it's just changing the path just to speed things up for our show. But either way, the end result is the source files from the DVD are gonna end up in the deployment share that's accessible across the network. So I'll click Next. Destination directory name you're just gonna leave that default. You notice it's picking that up from the DVD, I'm actually using education ISO. I'm gonna take that out just for our show for giggles here. Click Next, and then Next, and you can see that happened almost instantly. I'l click Finish, and now in that Wintin folder we created you'll see all of the different Wins that exist on that particular, in my case, that education DVD, right? So now I have all of these source files in there. You saw how fast that was, again, that's because I already copied those files to the E drive here. But notice they're gone, because it moved them to deployment share. And accessing it locally, you'll notice I don't have permissions, but I can force to go in their operating systems, Windows 10, and there's my source files. It's just like the DVD, how about that? All right, so we have created a deployment share. We created a folder to store our operating systems in, and then we imported the operating system files, right? Next, we're gonna create a task sequence. And the task sequence is the steps, the instructions that we're gonna fire against that machine, the actual upgrade process, right? So, again, under our Deployment Share, instead of operating systems, we're gonna go down to Task Sequence. Let's create a new folder, just again, for organization purposes. We'll call this Windows 10, and I'll click Next, and Next, and Finish. And now under Task Sequence, I have a folder called Windows 10, right? Then we're gonna right-click on Windows 10 and choose New Task Sequence. Here you're gonna give this a task sequence an ID, this is an in-house number. There's nothing you could call it BOB143 if you wanted, I'll call mine W10X64. Task sequence name, I'm gonna say W10X64 upgrade, right? Well actually, you know what, let's make that a little bit better, I'll show you why here in a minute. Let's say Windows 10 X64 upgrade. You can put comments in here, if you've done some customization to this WIM or something like that, maybe you wanna put that in there. We'll click Next, and then I've got a list of built-in task sequences, one of them being Standard Client Upgrade Test Sequence. >> Wow, that's pretty handy. [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] right? Just what we need, so we're gonna choose that. I'll zoom back out so I can see the rest of my window, we'll click Next. And then it's browsing into that operating system's node that we just imported the source file into. I can see that folder that we created and if I expand that out, there's all those source files, right? So I can simply select, in my case I'm gonna do Windows 10 Enterprise, and I'll click Next. Here, do I wanna specify a product key? In the real world I would probably wanna go ahead and put in my volume license or my multiple activation or whatever I was doing with my product key. So that we could activate the machine for our lab environment, I'm not going to. We'll click Next. For the Windows user full name, that's fine. I'm gonna put MRLABS just for us, I'll never Windows user. And I have set the Internet Explorer home page. I don't know why they've left that there, but we use Edge now, right? >> Yeah. >> Everybody's favorite browser. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it works. >> It's my favorite browser. >> Yeah, absolutely. All right, so we'll leave all that. Will click Next. I'm not gonna specify an admin password at this time, we're gonna click Next. There is my summary, I'll click Next, and then Finish. Man, that was pretty easy, right? >> Yeah, that's pretty fast. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And there's my new task sequence that we just created. Now here's where the fun comes. I'm gonna pretty much use it the way it is. I'm really here to show you how to use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, but if you want you can right-click on this task sequence. Now that it is created using that upgrade template that we picked from that list, you can go back into the properties, right? And here is the actual task sequence, and these are all the steps that it's gonna go through, right? And I can go to anyone, there's Upgrade Windows, right? And I can see that it's going to upgrade from Windows 10 Enterprise, that's the WIM that we picked from that list. If I wanted to change that, I can do that. If I wanna setup Windows update, I can take a look at options What about injecting drivers? Maybe we have a custom driver we need to install on our laptops to support a external DVD drive, or something like that. Copy scripts, validate information, go through Windows update pre or post install. There's a lot of different pieces that you can go ahead and modify through your task sequence. But this is your built in task sequence, and I can use it just like it is. I don't have to modify anything. In fact, that's what I'm gonna do. All right, so I'll click OK or Cancel. We didn't make any changes there. So now I have my task sequence built. We are ready now to attempt- >> Do the upgrade? >> Yeah, to do our upgrade, to do our deployer, right. >> All right. >> All right, let's try it out. So all we do, now that this is set up, and we might have done this ahead time, yesterday, last week, now it's time to roll out the upgrade to our laptops. So all we're going to do, you can do this through a script, there's ways I can start automating this. But I'm gonna run over to the Windows 8 machine, and I'm gonna launch Power Shell. I'm gonna run it as an administrator, although it really picks up permissions from running the task itself. But here I am I'm on my Windows 8 machine. And a couple of things I wanna do just to verify, I'm gonna right click here, and it's all ready pinned. So I've pinned this to the task bar. Let's make a new file on our desktop too, new text document. I'll just leave that over there. And it's so we can see that is doing an upgrade and it's leaving all of our information in place, all right. So let's do this, all we're gonna do is backslash, backslash, name of that server, svr01, backslash name of that share which was deployment share dollar sign, right, it's that hidden share, backslash scripts. And watch this, s tab, right. Use that tab auto fill, backslash, Li tab and there is LiteTouch.vbs. That is the name of the script that's gonna kick off this process and launch this test sequence. If you tab again, you'll see there is a LIteTouch.wsf, that is not the one you want. You want to call VBS. VBS does the initial process and then calls that other script to finish and do the heavy lifting. So don't mistakenly run the wrong LiteTouch, make sure you're running LiteTouch.vbs to start the process. And we'll go ahead and hit Enter. Give it just a second. And if everything is setup and your share is set up properly and your machine can connect to the share, you should see this. Here comes my Windows deployment wizard, right. And take a look, because of those instructions that we created in that task sequence or because we created a task sequence, I should say, I see the list of them. Notice I've got a folder here, right. I might have other folders for other task sequence, this is why said even though we don't have to it's really handy if you create those folders and then put everything in there for organizational purposes. That way if you have many of them, it's easy for other people to find what they're looking for >> That make sense. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Under Windows 10 we'll choose the only option we have, which is the Windows 10X64 upgrade. Remember at first I put like W10X64 and I said, no, no, no, let me change this and make it a little more user friendly? >> Yeah. >> Because I knew that was the name that's gonna show up in this list. And while I might understand those cryptic names, if my end user is running this process or some other admin that wasn't part of the setup is running it, they might not know what cryptic names I use. So make those friendly, make them descriptive. I'll select it, I'll click Next. And then remember I left the one check mark for ask whether or not you want to enable BitLocker. I'm not going to but I wanted you to see that process. We also could have backed up the computer. I've done some things with the admin account. We could have created a, what else, I think we wanted to know if we wanted to do a backup or create a whim for it. There's a few different options you could do there. I'm gonna leave this as do not enable BitLocker. I'll click Next. And then credentials for connecting to the network shares. I'm gonna use my credentials. And you might create an account specifically for this and give that account. There's no reason for me to be using a domain admin account or anything like that. I might create a, I don't know, a standard user account called task runner, and just give it permissions over that share so that I can use that here and wouldn't have any chance of being compromised when accessing other resources. But I'm using my account, I'll go ahead and click Next. You can take a look at the details and see what you've chosen, make sure everything is acceptable, and then click Begin. All right, and then we'll give it just a minute to make sure it kicks off, and now this process will take a little while, all right, because it's currently Windows 8. It's gonna launch up WinPE, it's going to use that USMT to migrate settings, it's going to do this in place upgrade, it's gonna put everything back. So it will take a little while. The system might reboot, or will reboot, once if not twice during this process. So what we'll do is we'll take a little TV time-out. When we come back, we'll see if this process finished and take a look at the results. All right, so our system's rebooted, it actually rebooted twice, and now I can see that I have a success message up on my screen. Operating system deployment completed successfully, and the big thing to look forward there is zero errors and zero warnings. I don't know if I can zoom in, I don't think I can without keeping focus on that, no. But I got zero errors, zero warnings, I can click details and I'll see there's a whole lot of nothing there, which is a good thing in this case. So I'll click Finish, and there we go. I am gonna have to close this, relaunch it just to get my resolution right so it will stretch out for me. So let me double-click on that again. And I'll go ahead and log in. And you can see, already see, right, it's no longer Windows 8, it is now Windows 10. But up here at the top you can see client 08, not pulling any shenanigans on you, I didn't switch virtual machines. This is the same machine that when we started this process was running Windows 8. There's that text document that I pinned to the desktop right before we launched the wizard. I now have an icon for Microsoft Edge because that's a Windows 10 thing. Powershell is still pinned to the task bar, so we can see it did indeed do an upgrade. But leave all of my things in place, right. If I log off, and I apologize for that awful color. >> [LAUGH] >> That's left over from that yellow background on the Windows 8 desktop. I am gonna sign out though. >> A nice brown too. >> It was really bad, right. It tries to pick up the color you had prior, before the upgrade. Okay, I'll try to keep a similar theme. I'm going to launch that again, I'm just gonna reconnect again so that it'll stretch out. And remember Aubri had an account on this machine, so if we log in as Aubri, And if I can remember her super secret password and make sure caps lock is not on. >> I changed it, I'm sorry. >> Dog goneit, >> [LAUGH] >> She did not tell me she changed her password. We'll get this logged in, and we should see that her stuff is still there as well, right. Her background should still be there, her documents should still be there. That's the idea of doing that in-place upgrade, is everything stays where it is. I don't take up any network resources, I don't take up any additional storage because I didn't have to move all the settings and data aside while I did the swapping out of the operating system. We did what's called an in-place upgrade. Everything stays there. We just kind of behind the scenes swapped out the operating system files. There we go, we see her Russian blue on our background, we got the to-do list over here, got Powershell pinned to the taskbar. If I open up File Explorer, take a look at Documents, I see reports one, two, and three. So our in-place upgrade was successful and we saw how it was once we got the MDT setup properly, we got our source files imported, got our task sequences created, it's really a pretty easy process. >> All right, this has been In-Place Upgrade with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. It's reminiscent of the USMT, User State Migration Tool. So very cool stuff, makes things a lot easier for you and your users. So thank you much, Mike, for guiding us through that, and thank you all out there for watching. Signing off for ITProTV, I've been your host, Aubri Spurgin. >> And I'm Mike Rodrick. >> And we'll see you next time. [MUSIC] >> Thank you for watching ITProTV.