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Disable USMT during Computer Refresh in MDT Lite Touch

By Johan Arwidmark / February 18, 2022

Every now and then you need to refresh a machine into a known state, and the MDT Lite Touch Computer Refresh scenario does just that. The default behavior of that scenario is using USMT to capture user data and settings, but what if you simply want the refresh to happen without the USMT backup and […]

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Moving The ConfigMgr Content Library to another Drive

By Johan Arwidmark / December 26, 2021

Here is a quick guide for moving (or merging) the ConfigMgr Content Library from one drive / volume to another using the Content Library Transfer tool (ContentLibraryTransfer.exe). Starting with ConfigMgr 1806, the Content Library Transfer Tool is included with the ConfigMgr installation. Prior to ConfigMgr 1806 you would have to download the ConfigMgr Toolkit to […]

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Integrate MDT with ConfigMgr 2103 or Later

By Johan Arwidmark / December 2, 2021

If you tried to integrate MDT with a new installs of ConfigMgr 2103 or later you probably learned that the MDT console extension won't show by default, even after running the Configure ConfigMgr Integration wizard. This is because of a security change Microsoft did for console extensions. To allow for the MDT extensions, open your […]

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Upgrading to Windows 11 using MDT Lite Touch

By Johan Arwidmark / December 2, 2021

TL;DR To use MDT Lite Touch for Windows 11 upgrades you need to add the /eula accept parameter to setup. That's easily done by using the WindowsUpgradeAdditionalOptions task sequence variable in MDT. Continue to read for more details… Background If you try to use MDT Lite Touch to upgrade a Windows 10 machine to Windows […]

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Back to Basics – Custom Computer Naming in MDT

By Johan Arwidmark / November 27, 2021

The rules engine in MDT is one of the most powerful ways of applying settings during OS Deployment. It uses INI files that it parses and converts to task sequence variables. For example, this morning I was tagged in a Tweet where a fellow deployment geek was asking about how to name computers based on […]

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Using Azure Labs for your Home Lab

By Johan Arwidmark / November 24, 2021

For most Home labs you typically want to use a workstation or server with lots of disk and memory. But if you just want a simple lab, that is accessible from anywhere in the world, Azure Labs can be a good option. Obviously running a lab full time in Azure is going to be quite […]

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Setup a Workgroup Server with PXE (WDS) for MDT Lite Touch

By Johan Arwidmark / October 11, 2021

Here is a quick guide to configure a workgroup server with PXE for MDT Lite Touch (or any other deployment solution based on WinPE). In this example I'm using a Windows Server 2019 server named MDT01 configured for being in a workgroup, and the PXE server is Windows Deployment Services (WDS). Prerequisites For this guide […]

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Understanding the MDT Lite Touch Exits Feature

By Johan Arwidmark / October 11, 2021

For the past decade or so, MDT Lite Touch have had a little know feature called Exits (or UpdateExit), which is called every time you do a full update of the deployment share. The feature was added back in MDT 2010, and was originally documented by Michael Niehaus (@mniehaus) here: MDT 2010 New Feature #17: […]

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Cloud OS Deployment, Part 4 – Imaging over Internet, directly into Windows Autopilot

By Johan Arwidmark / September 10, 2021

Cloud OS Deployment, or Cloud Imaging, allows you to deploy machines without any local infrastructure other than Internet access. It can for example be used to: In this post you learn how to configure MDT/PSD for a proof-of-concept scenario: Having machines automatically enroll into Windows Autopilot during imaging, via some clever PowerShell automation. Note #1: […]

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Move Hyper-V VMs to another Disk Volume

By Johan Arwidmark / September 4, 2021

In my lab I use virtual machines a lot, and not surprisingly, sometimes I need to move around Hyper-V VMs to either a new disk volume, or just to a new folder on the same volume, because of disk space. Either way, with PowerShell that is a quite easy task. Here are a few examples: […]

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Using SMB Compression with Windows 11

By Johan Arwidmark / August 6, 2021

While some SMB Compression code has been in Windows 10 for a while, it was not until Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 it was implemented end to end. Anyway, that just had to be tested, so I quickly deployed a few Windows 11 machines and started doing some benchmarking. In this test I'm using […]

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Using RestPS to Access the MDT Database

By Johan Arwidmark / July 28, 2021

This week I needed to access the MDT Database via HTTPS for a cloud imaging implementation. The task at hand was to retrieve the computer name from the database by sending the computers serial number to it, but this technique can be used to read or write any settings in the database. This could have […]

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