School me: Moving from Acronis to MDT

I've been given a project to look at migrating us from Acronis True Image to Microsoft's Deployment Server.

I've currently got about 8-10 images in use.

Dell Windows 7 (works for the Precisions, Optiplexes, and Latitudes with just a few tiny tweaks for the Latitudes and Precisions)

2x HP Windows 7 (one works on 2 laptop models, one works on another 2)

Lenovo Yoga 8
Lenovo Yoga Thinkpad 12 8 (works on 2014 and 2015 models)
Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (works on Pro and regular Yoga 2)

Intel NUC 7

PowerEdge T310 (works on T320 as well)

And I'm sure there are more.

This has served us well for the past few years, as there were issues with a previous deployment tool, but now they're wanting to go back.

I don't see any way to pull a WIM from the Acronis backups, so I'm pretty much boned on that. What resources can I use to look into what's need to to get all the Windows updates, all the drivers, and all the applications I had loaded onto the images prior to Sysprep onto these deployment...things?

I'm rather unhappy we're losing all the tweaks I've done on the images, as that was my baby when I first started here a year and a half ago. It feels like it has the potential to be 2 steps forward, but 5 steps back if I don't get this figured out.

If you want to use your existing images, couldn't you just restore the Acronis image to a PC, run sysprep, and then boot into WinPE and capture it to a WIM image using DISM?

I have migrated several images created with Altiris Deployment Solution to WIM images using this technique and never had any problems. In theory it this should work for any image since you are basically just deploying the image and then recapturing it.

Personally I use clean images. The only changes I make to the plain image is injecting offline updates quarterly Any other changes I prefer to do in the task sequence.

I make a bare base images with only updates by OS (i.e. Win 7, 8, 10) with a VM. Take a snapshot then copy the machine as a image using SysPrep then roll the vm back to the snapshot after.

Then inject drivers while imaging. You create driver packs that MDT looks at the bios and loads to corresponding drivers.

You really wouldn’t want to use your existing fat images with MDT, it would ignore the biggest benefit of MDT, the ability to make your deployment process modular.

What you really should do is:
1. Create a “lab” deployment share on a virtual machine, populated with your vanilla installation files for Windows.
2. Create a task sequence that deploys the vanilla operating system to a virtual machine, updates it, and suspends the task sequence, then captures an image.
3. Run that task sequence to deploy a reference system, customize the environment while the task sequence is suspended, then click resume to let the task sequence complete and capture the image.
4. Take the resulting WIM from the above capture step and import it into a separate, “production” deployment share.
5. Populate the “production” deployment share with drivers (enterprise driver packs are the route to go) and applications you need on the deployed machines. Be sure to use folders to organize your drivers by make/model/operating system and to use selection profiles and deployment share rules to select the right drivers for each model during deployment.
6. Create a task sequence for each deployment scenario you want to automate. For example you could deploy by department with each department getting a different set of apps. You also need separate task sequence for each operating system, architecture and for upgrading vs an image based deployment.
7. Run the task sequence on the target machines and end up with ready to use machines, no per-machine tweaking required.

Some of the benefits to this process are:
• Easily repeated process for updating or tweaking your reference image
• Only one image to manage rather than 8-10
• Completely automated task sequences that can deploy different sets of apps for different scenarios, meaning less tweaking on each individual machine
• Easily updated and managed drivers

With all that said, as wbo pointed out, MDT is still capable of capturing your 8-10 images and deploying them by simply capturing a WIM from a deployed system.

Some recommended reading:
Deploy Windows 10 with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit on the TechNet Library
Desktop Image Management: Build a Better Desktop Image from the TechNet Magazine
Surface Pro 3 Deployment and Administration Guide from Microsoft Download Center
Windows 8.1 Deployment Jump Start at the Microsoft Virtual Academy
How to manage Out-of-Box Drivers with the use of Model Specific Driver Groups in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Update 1 from the Ask the Core Team TechNet Blog
Creating a fully-patched image using MDT 2010 Lite Touch from Michael Niehaus’ TechNet Blog

Brandon
Windows Outreach Team- IT Pro
Windows for IT Pros at TechNet