Is it possible to produce a pre-patched Win7 WIM image using MDT deployment Workbench only?

Question

Is it possible to produce a pre-patched Win7 WIM image using MDT deployment Workbench only? Presently, I'm using dism command line tool in order to pre-patch the WIM images with the downloaded packages. thus, I can put the freshly updated WIM image on the WDS server in order to distribute the new (patched) OS image.

Recently, we moved to MDT. I can see that in deployment workbench you can add packages, drivers and applications right on top of a set of images provided by WDS ( or from a local WIM storage ).

However, something is not clear to me about the mechanism behind MDT. When I add drivers/packages/applications, a new image is produced or for each machine that I will deploy all the patches will be apllied every time? In other words, is there a first step in which an "updated" iamage is produced and then deployed on several machines or every time MDT makes the patches will be installed on each machine in the deployment stage?

In the first case, is it possible to obtain a WIM image with all the stuffs without deploying it and keep it for example for offline update or for a backup instead to reapply all the patches every time ?

Answer 1

What the workbench does is that it injects the drivers and apps to be installed into your .wim image. After creating your image and setting it up in the Deployment Shares section of Workbench, you can then select what drivers and applications must be injected into the image. Then right click on your deployment share name and choose Update Deployment Share. This will put all the recent changes into your .wim file. This is then for every machine that you will want to install from then on-wards. If you want different programs on different machines, create a new deployment share.

What I do is that I setup a vanilla Win 7 PC. Connect it to Windows Update and make sure that all the patches are downloaded from Windows Update. I also install all the apps like Office, Adobe Reader and other apps. I then use ImageX to create my .wim file. I drop that into my workbench and inject all my network card drivers for that image. And then deploy. I have a WSUS running on my server, making sure that those updates that are released after creating the image will then be updated. Only problem with this is if I make program updates like recently going from VB Express 2010 to VB Express 2013, I had to create a whole new image.

Answer 2

MDT does not update the images (.WIMs) with the packages when the share is updated. The packages are injected into the image at the time of deployment. In your deployment task sequence, see the apply packages step under Preinstall.

See this blog post from Michael Niehaus on Creating a fully-patched image using MDT 2010 Lite Touch, it covers the scenario quite thoroughly.

One thing I would like to make clear though is that you do not need multiple deployment shares for different configurations of packages, drivers, or applications. You can use a single deployment share to deploy to hundreds of makes and models with different hardware, different applications, and different configurations of packages. An excellent example requiring different packages is where an organization requires different language packs depending on geographical location. In this scenario, MDT can be used to select between different selection profiles each with different language packs. The same solution can be used to manage drivers where a single conglomerate driver store might present conflicts. Selection profiles are explained in this blog post.