Hi -
Got a home lab with both virtual machines and physical. I've hit a bit of dilemma, and wondering if I can get some advice around creating/installing custom installation disks/ISOs. I'll try and keep it simple.
My requirements:
- Preferred method of install is cd, dvd, iso, or if necessary thumb drive. This is due to never having guarantee of network hookup to PXE boot and deploy off the network, however Iwould like that as an option too if possible.
- Only interface I want to see is choosing what to do with disk in the very beginning of setup, and ability to enter a key.
- Want to integrate all patches.
- Want only a default Administrator user, and both that and the default profile to have certain settings (i.e. file explorer view settings, quick launch, etc.).
- Want to customize other things like turning off UAC and Firewall.
I'm not looking for any support for these things, but I tried nLite for XP and got most of the above requirements down, though it was tricky. I moved on to Win7 and found a combination of using rt Se7en lite, Windows System Image Manager and some manual edits of the autounattend.xml got me most but not all of the way there, and it's becoming a ridiculously time consuming task....and I haven't even gotten to Win8 and the server OSs yet.
I work for large company (approx 120k nodes) and I talked to one of our desktop engineers and he swore up and down the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit was the way to go for what I wanted to do. But it sounds like that's focused on deploying the images over
the network (via whatever mechanism).
So the question I'm getting to - is MDT a better solution for all those OS creates/installs than what I've been doing, can I meet all the above requirements, and most importantly can I setup to install from a CD/DVD/ISO (even thumb drive if necessary)?
Thanks in advance for any advice.