Ultimate Guide of MDT Driver Management

One of the hardest part in management dealing with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is the Driver node. The number one question asked is how to manage all the drivers for all the different models in an infrastructure. The question is really hard to answer because it really depends on your environment and how many models you have in your office. I have three scenarios that works great for any situation, but it really depends on how you wants to make MDT work for your environment. The first step is to take care of your WinPE drivers for booting

Scenario #1 – This is for a small company, they are only deploying one operating system, say Windows 8.1 x64, and they have a few hardware models from the same vendor. The key things here are that they are deploying just one family of operating systems and that the hardware is from the same vendor. The reason is that the larger vendors do test compatibility among their own models per operating system family, so it’s quite rare that a driver from one model will interfere with another driver.

Scenario #2 – This is a small or midsize company, they are deploying multiple operating systems, say Windows 7 SP1 x64 and Windows 8.1 x64, and they have a few more hardware models but still from the same vendor. The major difference from the first scenario is that are deploying multiple operating systems. Since the default method is using PnP ID detection among all imported drivers we need to have a way of filtering the drivers so that only Windows 7 drivers are considered for Windows 7 SP1 deployments, and that only Windows 8.1 drivers are considered for Windows 8.1 deployments. The feature in MDT 2013 that we can use for this filtering is called Selection Profiles.

Scenario #3 – This scenario has the following assumptions. This is a small, medium or larger company, they are deploying multiple operating systems, say Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1, they have many hardware models, and from multiple vendors. The major difference from the second scenario is that they are using hardware from multiple vendors, and the fact that they want more granular control of their drivers.