Quick notes about MDT 2010 Update 1, released today!

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For those of you who didn’t notice the posting on our team blog talking about today’s release of MDT 2010 Update 1 or hadn’t signed up for the beta on https://connect.microsoft.com so you didn’t get the e-mail notification, I wanted to post a few quick notes about the new release:

  • Read the release notes and what’s new documents before installing the new version.  Also, make sure you have backups of your servers just in case something doesn’t go quite right.  While I don’t expect any issues, I really won’t have much sympathy if you say that you don’t have a backup of at least your deployment shares.
  • After the new release is made “live” on the download servers, it can take a while before the files are available worldwide.  Oddly enough, the download landing page seems to get updated right away, so while it may look like you are downloading the new version, make sure it really is new.  Two ways to check:
    • Look at the size of the MSI files.  Because MDT 2010 Update 1 added the new UDI scenario, the installer for Update 1 is bigger than that for MDT 2010 RTW.  The original MDT 2010 RTW MSI is 10MB; the new MDT 2010 Update 1 MSI should be about 16MB.
    • Look at the properties of the MSI files.  The “Details” tab should show the build number.  For the original MDT 2010 RTW release, the build was “5.0.1641.0”.  For MDT 2010 Update 1, it’s “5.1.1642.1”.  (The beta version was “5.1.1641.58”.)
  • If you have the MDT 2010 Update 1 Beta installed, uninstall it before installing the final MDT 2010 Update 1 release.
    • Due to an issue in the MDT 2010 Update 1 Beta installer, it’s getting installed “per-user”.  As a result, a subsequent install of the released MDT 2010 Update 1 actually ends up with both of them installed.  That gets kind of messy.  That’s why the release notes say that an upgrade from MDT 2010 Update 1 Beta to MDT 2010 Update 1 isn’t supported.
  • Don’t try to upgrade a deployment share that is in use as the upgrade will fail when running into in-use files.
    • You would typically see issues replacing executables such as BDDRUN.EXE or the task sequencer files (TSMBootstrap.exe and other related files).
    • We also suggest turning off the virus scanner, as some of them are way too aggressive and interfere with installers.  (For those that have a rule in place to restrict “autorun.inf” files, you’ll need to turn that off since we put one of these files in the deployment share.)

Also remember the typical upgrade process:

  • Install the new MSI on any machine with the current MSI.
  • For Lite Touch, upgrade each deployment share through deployment workbench.  After upgrading, you’ll need to regenerate boot images by updating the deployment share, burn new boot CDs (as the old ones will likely not work properly with the new release), update media, etc.
    • Existing task sequences will continue to work, but we have changed these templates to address some specific issues, so if you are running into issues you would want to create new task sequences.
  • For Zero Touch and UDI, you need to run the “Configure ConfigMgr integration” wizard again for each machine where this was previously performed.  This copies the new MDT DLLs into the ConfigMgr console installation directory.
    • Existing task sequence will continue to work with the old MDT toolkit files package.  To use the new MDT 2010 Update 1 functionality, I suggest creating new task sequences that use a new MDT toolkit files package.  I don’t recommend trying to update existing task sequences by changing them to use a new MDT toolkit files package.

This release is definitely recommended for all current MDT 2010 users (and those still running MDT 2008 and BDD 2007 too), as it adds a few key features (see the team blog entry) and fixes a variety of issues in the current MDT 2010 release.