Overview of the deployment process

- Depending how familiar you are with deployment technologies and processes, they've been around for years and we're really going to take a look at how we can do those types of things with Microsoft technologies. And the great thing about most of the tools that you're going to see in this chapter as well as throughout the entire course, they're all free. And the nice thing about this, it really allows you to get started and it just takes you time to get your images ready to go but you have to have some key tenets to understand how these technologies actually work and can develop for us. When we look at that, it starts with just some basic terms that we have and lucky for us some of the terms that we have around the environment are around Windows Sever so hopefully you're familiar with Active Directory, the key directory for all user IDs and our groups. It's been around for years and really it's the industry standard of how we control access to our networks. And just like any deployment environment, we want to be able to control who gets our desktops. Well Active Directory's going to be the key security tenet under there around identities and how we can work with those We also have DNS and DHCP, now these are by no means new, they've been around for years to offer name resolution services, so we can actually find the resources during the deployment process. But we also have DHCP so we can actually give addresses to those systems that are coming online for the first time. So maybe you've bought a brand new computer and you want to provision it with your corporates image, well we're going to have to be able to give it a DHCP address over the network. And we'll talk about that, and we'll actually see how those all come together throughout this entire course. What are some other key TLAs you need to know? I always joke, three letter acronyms is my TLA for the day. Well Deployment has its fair share of TLAs for us to work with and it starts with just one of the methodologies which is Light Touch Installation. An LTI or Light Touch Installation is, as the name implies, somebody on the other end of that system, that's receiving the image that you create, has to do something. And that might be as simple, as simply hitting the enter key or plug into a USB stick and starting the computer to provision off of that USB stick that you've given. At the end of the day, it's really just a matter of where those images are stored. We have ZTI or Zero Touch Installation. Now this isn't a type of Italian food, sometimes people just call it ziti, but as the name implies, what happens here is we actually can have a little bit of fun and actually push systems down and it's fully automated type of deployment inside of our technologies. We also have WIM, now this is probably the biggest term and we'll spend some time talking more about WIM. But the Windows Image Format's actually been around for years but it's a hardware agnostic type of format that allows us to deploy our images. And in fact, when you go through the Microsoft deployment process in this course, you're going to be creating your own WIM file that has your corporate image inside of it. If you were to go buy a Windows 7 DVD or a Windows 8 DVD or a Windows 10 DVD at the store and open it up and just browse the files, you will probably find two really large files. One called install.wim and one called boot.wim. And in this course, you're going to make your own versions of those files and I'll take you through all of that. So we talked about WIM just a second ago, and really some more words on WIM and what it can do. It's a file based image format that allows us to store multiple images within one actual file. So unlike Ghost or other tools that you might have used in the past, you don't have to have multiple images for the different types of sources or deliveries. You can actually have one image, and actually have other things bolted on that image via task sequences, which we'll talk about how this works. But the nice thing about WIM, everything's stored inside of it. It's also hardware agnostic, so I don't have to have multiple images taking storage on my server for an HP system, a Dell system, a Lenovo, a homespun system or even virtual systems. WIMs can be deployed and delivered to those actual systems very quickly. The nice thing about WIM is when the system gets a WIM file it actually goes through an installation process. Now that might be an upgrade or it might be a wipe and reload but those WIM files actually get delivered and do a fresh install. That's how it can be hardware agnostic and the installation speeds of our modern operating systems are actually very fast, so we don't lose anything that we might have gained from just copying files down like we've gone in the past with other deployment technologies. We also can service this image offline. The nice thing about WIM files is, lets say you had one DLL change, maybe a little 10k DLL file. Well in previous technologies, you might have to recreate the entire image to make that happen. The nice thing with WIM, you can actually open that file up and just simply copy and paste in that new DLL file and essentially update your image without having to recreate it. Then lastly, the nice thing about WIM is that we can deploy this to any drive of any size. It's part of that hardware agnostic storage because it does an installation process, we don't have to make sure okay that's a 200 gig harddrive I'm delivering to but that's a 250, I don't have to have different images for that, WIM just knows and just works. And how we can actually store that information. Now WIM actually gets sent to the desktops by a variety of tools. And there's several tools you're going to see throughout this course to be able to do this. And they're listed here. And we have the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit and this tool really is key to actually deploying in any enterprise, you got to know what you have. And MAP essentially provides you a map of your environment, allows you to see what's there. We have the Windows Deployment Services, this is also a built-in role to our servers. It's formally known as RIS, Remote Installation Services depending on how long you've been playing with Windows servers, you might be familiar with RIS. In our story today, or as we go through this course, it provides the pixie capabilities for our system, so we can actually boot off of a network adapter and actually contact our services for deployment. We have the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, now this is the big kahuna tool, this is the one where we do everything inside of our deployment environment and a bulk of what you'll see in this course. If you're not familiar with this tool, folks, you're going to get very familiar with what it can do. It actually creates tasks sequences, it provisions our WIM files, it creates everything for us, and we'll talk more about it as we go on. We also have the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit or the WADK and what this does is provides a lot of great configuration details under the covers and in fact, is a requirement for the MDT toolkit to be installed, we have to have the WADK in the system. Lastly, we have System Center Configuration Manager or SCCM, now this tool is really for the zero-touch installation environments. We're not going to cover that tool in this course today. For the main reason why, we don't need it. And as a matter of fact, SCCM will actually leverage the tools that we use in MDT. The key reason why we won't cover SCCM is it's not free and it's also a huge complex environment, much longer than we have for this particular course. Now the great thing about these tools with the exception of SCCM, folks, they're all free. 100% free, just go download the tools and spend your time creating your images and you're going to learn that throughout the course. Now you might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed with all the tools and terminology that you've just seen, kind of like when you opened up a 10,000 piece puzzle with no picture to actually help you build that puzzle. The great thing about this, I'm going to show you how to actually build that puzzle and actually help complete your deployment picture.