How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 1
There are many MDT environment setups, this one is mine.
Step .1 Pre-Flight
I use a 2008 R2 SP1 Server as my base. I enable the Hyper-V role on it and create 2 VMs. Half of you reading this are going to say “But we’re a VMWare shop, we don’t run Hyper-V.” Ok, so stand it up like this anyway. It’ll make your life easier when you are creating your reference images to be using Hyper-V, where all the drivers are natively available instead of having to provide VMWare drivers that you are just going to strip out with a sysprep anyway…
So, 2 VMs, setup as thus:
VM1 is a Windows 7 x86 SP1 install.
This VM I name MDT-Console, give it 2 processors and 2 GB of RAM, 50 GB of space and install WAIK and MDT. I install Office 2010 and download the “Optional - MDT 2010 Update 1 Print-Ready Documentation.zip” to this VM.
VM2 is a Windows 2008 R2 SP1 install.
This VM I name MDT-Share, give it 2 processors and 2 GB of RAM, 200 GB of space (1 big volume) and create 2 File System Folders and Shares, “MDT-Reference” and “MDT-Deployment”.
Step 1. Establish our shares.
To make things simple, I domain join my 2 VMs. I permission the account I am using on the Windows 7 VM1 to full rights on the VM2 shares. I then open my MDT console (I pin mine to the taskbar in this VM) and create the reference and deployment shares by clicking on “Deployment Shares” in the console and selecting “New Deployment Share” which invokes a wizard.
When I do a [\\MDT-Share\](file://\\MDT-Share\) it autofills…
I then select my Reference Share, cause I want to establish it first.
I name it (logically) MDT Reference Share in my console…
On the next 3 screens, I leave the “Capture” checkbox checked, because it’s a reference share, where we are going to do a lot of capturing. <next>
I leave the Administrator question checkbox blank/default. <next>
I leave the product key blank/default. <next>
<next>
Awww yeah, now we’re cooking with gas.
To create the Deployment Share, I basically do the EXACT same thing, except I select and name it Deployment instead of Reference, and I uncheck the box to “Ask if an image should be captured”…
Which leaves the console looking like this:
