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Finally I have seen a nice Microsoft solution for light touch deployment of servers and workstations. During a half-hour demo session on TechEd MS demonstrated that deploying new desktops and servers doesn’t have to be a tough job if you use the new Deployment Toolkit 2010 and WAIK 2.0. It was impressive to see how easy automated deployment for various operating systems becomes when you use the new Deployment Workbench which wraps like a management shell around the individual WAIK 2.0 components. Big plus for the Deployment Workbench is that all UI management operations are also accessible from Powershell by loading a single powershell snap-in making it easier to automate.

WAIK 2.0 comes with some new tools like DSIM.exe which is a combination of previous WAIK tools like Pkgmgr.exe, Intlcfg.exe, PEimg.exe and has basic functionality to mount and maintain Windows images (either WIM or VHD file format) by adding or removing device drivers, patches, software packages etc..

Other new features in this toolkit:

• BCDboot is a new tool used to quickly set up a system partition, or to repair the boot environment.
• USMT. User State Migration Tool used for doing an in place migration while maintaining all user data and settings.
• Volume Activation Management Tool. Manages volume activation of Windows clients using a Multiple Activation Key (MAK)
• Hardware recognition and driver injection (also during pre-installation stage while booting from WinPE).
• Create image files for media-based deployments from existing deployment shares (WIM and/or ISO image files).

It supports deployment of Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003/2008/2008 R2

Read more about MDT 2010:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd407791.aspx

What’s new in MDT 2010 (link to Word doc):
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=163309