Building Golden Images, Master Images, References Images (whatever you want to call them) is a necessity in today’s world. All too often I see Citrix customers using persistent VMs built manually. Sometimes 20-50 of the same VMs, going through the same manual clicks for upgrades, the same manual motions for software pushes, windows updates, etc… NO MORE PLEASE!!
Citrix PVS and MCS have helped pave the way for non-persistent VMs. <insert tangent> I’d really like to see this approach take over in the infrastructure role world too. Think stateless VMs for Citrix ADC, Delivery Controllers, Storefront, and other infrastructure roles <end tangent>. As soon as a persistent machine is built, your guess is as good as mine on what’s all changed on it from day to day. Maybe someone ran a script that changed something, maybe a bad windows update came in, SCCM pushed a bunch of software to it accidentally, the list goes on.
MDT isn’t the only product to build golden images. You can certainly use SCCM, Puppet, Terraform, Ansible, Chocolatey, Jenkins, etc… the list goes on and on. IMO MDT is one of the easiest and windows friendly options, but it’s nice to have other tools in the arsenal to solve whatever use case comes up. Like using Hashicorp Packer to create the VM and auto boot it into the MDT task sequence.
Over the next few months I’ll be sharing some blog posts regarding tips, tricks, gotchas, “how I did it” type examples of ways I’m leveraging MDT.