Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 2 v6.3.8330 Available

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 2 v6.3.8330 it's now available through Microsoft Download Center.

This new version it's primarily a "quality release" with now major features.
Here's a summary of the changes in this update:

• Security and cryptographic related improvements:
• Relaxed permissions on newly created deployment shares (still secure by default, but now also functional by default)
• Creating deployment shares via Windows PowerShell adds same default permissions
• Updated hash algorithm usage from SHA1 to SHA256
• Includes the latest Configuration Manager task sequence binaries
• Enhanced user experience for Windows 10 in-place upgrade task sequence
• Enhanced split WIM functionality
• Fixed OSDJoinAccount account usage in UDI scenario
• Fixed issues with installation of Windows 10 language packs
• Various accessibility improvements
• Monitoring correctly displays progress for all scenarios including upgrade
• Improvements to smsts.log verbosity

Download MDT 2013 Update 2 v6.3.8330 here:

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 2 v6.3.8330

WDS - Injecting VMware VMXNET3 Driver Error

I'm creating a new WDS + MDT infrastructure almost from scratch and I'm using VMware for deployment and image creation.
Because I'm using VMware VMXNET3 for network and VMware ParaVirtual SCSI for storage I needed to inject this 2 drivers on my Windows Deployment Servers (WDS) boot image for installing the created images.

Doing this on MDT when creating the boot images for the litetouch deployment has no issue, but for the boot.wim for installing images (extracted for the sources\boot.wim of Windows DVD) something goes wrong.
For some unknown although the VMware ParaVirtual driver gets easily inject, the VMXNET3 driver don't.
Not really investigated the reason, but has a workaround, follow this easy steps.

So what we're going to do it's to inject the drivers on boot.wim file using DISM:

1. First copy the file from a DVD/ISO (it's located on "...\sources\boot.wim") and copy it to a local drive (ex.: D:\Temp\)


2. Than you'll need to mount the WIM file:
   DISM /Mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\Temp\boot.wim /Index:2 /MountDir:D:\Temp\MountPoint


3. Now, you're ready to inject the VMware VMXNET3 Driver (or any other drivers), you just need to point to the *.inf file:
   DISM /Image:D:\Temp\MountPoint /Add-Driver /Driver:D:\Temp\Drivers\VMwareVMXNET3\vmxnet3ndis6.inf


4. Drivers injected, now unmount and commit changes:
   DISM /Unmount-Image /MountDir:D:\Temp\MountPoint /Commit

And you're done!

Now you just need to publish that boot.wim on your WDS and deploy images.

MDT 2013 Update 1 Version 8298 - Invalid Credentials

Microsoft has recently launched a new version of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 1 version 8298.

There's been a couple of issues with this build because the way the DeploymentShare$ it's created.

If you take a look at this share permission, you'll notice that permissions are just for "CREATOR OWNER" instead of "Everyone" like the previous versions.

Besides that, now the DeployRoot parameter it's not configured on the bootstrap.ini.

So, to make this work again, follow this steps:

1. First, you'll need to edit your DeploymentShare$ permissions so that you can connect to MDT from the machine you're deployment.
   You can achieve this simply by adding the group "Everyone" to the share permissions, or if you want to be more restrictive you can add the "Administrators" group with "Full Control".
   
   
   
   
2. Now that you're done with the permissions, you'll need to take care of bootstrap.ini.
   To do so, just navigate to your DeploymentShare folder, and open "bootstrap.ini" that's located on the "Control" folder
   
   
3. Here you'll have to had under "[Default]" the following parameter:
   DeployRoot=\\your_mdt_server\DeploymentShare$
   
   
4. Save the file and you're done.

Now that's you've change the bootstrap.ini, like always, you'll need to regenerate your boot files:

1. Open MDT Workbench and click properties on your deployment share and then Update
   
   
2. Here you'll need to choose "Completely regenerate the boot images" and now just wait for the process to finish.
   
   

And you're done!

Hope this helps some people that are having some issues after installing this latest version of MDT.