WDS and MDT

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I'm looking to automate deployments of windows 7/8 via pxeboot and know there are various methods of doing what I need. We can't buy SCCM so am looking at WDS and MDT. Are both of these deployment tools or am I getting confused with them. If they are what would people suggest using. Reading into it I suspect MDT is the way to go as it appear that it will inject drivers, applications and updates when imaging.

Also am i right in that with Windows 7 and onwards being a file based deployment I only need to build one master image for all makes and models of PC's and Laptops (all 64bit) and the driver install will do the rest?

I remember reading all this doing my MCITP but forgot it all as I thought I would never need to use it.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

It goes WDS - MDT - SCCM with regards to the capabilities of deployment so yes MDT is definitely a way forward, it's somewhat clunky but it does work.

You would also need WDS installed to let you PXE boot the devices.

 

Cheers Simon for the reply. Now been told we will consider SCCM. It would be great to learn it but it might be overkill for 120 PC in 2 sites. Will have to weigh SCCM and MDT both up.

 

Not to mention the expense!

 

SCCM offers so much more than just OS Deployment, it offers patching, application deployment, asset reporting as well as desired configuration management.
I have to be honest and say that it does make my life easier for management of servers and desktops.

Have a look at SCCM 2012 (which I haven't looked at yet) because there are some changes to the way SCCM is installed\configures.

I have a post here somewhere describing the steps required to install and configure SCCM and if you need something else let me know because I still have the documents available at home as well.

 

We are an MS Gold partner so I think we get it cheap or free as part of our licence agreement.

- - - Updated - - -

Cheers Simon, I think I was look at SCCM solely from the deployment perspective but patching and application deployment would be great to have as well under one management tool.