My Experience With The PowerShell Deployment Toolkit (PDT) – Part 1 (Downloader.ps1)

Hello Everyone,

Despite not being able to post anything new for a while (in the process of moving), I thought I would share a few things quickly.

First, although this has been out for a little while, I happened to stumble across it recently, the PowerShell Deployment Toolkit.

If anyone has following my guides on installing and configuring the various System Center components, the PDT is absolutely amazing. For those that may not know, the PDT toolkit was created to setup an entire System Center environment, each/every component, in addition to post-installation integration. A big thank you goes out to Microsoft for releasing this to the community.

For further information on the PowerShell Deployment Toolkit (PDT), see the following: http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/02/08/deployment-introducing-powershell-deployment-toolkit.aspx

So, with that being said, I will walk through my experience using this toolkit. This is very useful for re-building your lab when you need to.

Start by downloading the PDT toolkit. If you do a Google search for the “PowerShell Deployment Toolkit”, you will end up at the following (http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PowerShell-Deployment-f20bb605).

Important: Please note that at the time of this writing, the current version is 2.5.2509, which resolves the media validation issue with System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager Prerequisites.

Download the ZIP file and extract it, which will contain the following files:

• Downloader.ps1
• Installer.ps1
• Variable.xml
• VariableAD.xml
• VMCreator.ps1
• Workflow.xml

Now that we have the scripts and XML files extracted, we can start with the first script: Downloader.ps1. This script will download all of the files required, including extracting them.

IMPORTANT: Downloader.ps1 must be run from a Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 system, since it uses the ability of those operating systems to mount and extract files from an ISO.

Copy the Downlaod.ps1 script to your Virtual Machine host. In my example, mine is in “C:\Users\Adin\Downloads\PDT2.5.2509”.

Now open a Administrative PowerShell prompt, by right-clicking on PowerShell, and choose ‘Run as Administrator’.

In the PowerShell command prompt, change your working directory to the location of the Downloader.ps1 script, like follows: cd “C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads\PDT2.5.2509” and press Enter.

Now run the Downloadd script by typing Downloader.ps1 and pressing Enter. This will start the downloader script. This will download the files required.

When the script is complete, there will be a folder on the root of C:\ called Installer. Within here will be all the files required for installation.

NOTE: Depending on your Internet speed, the download can take several hours. According to Microsoft, the script will download approximately 15 GB of files, and will extract these into approximately 35 GB; so ensure that you have enough space.

In the next post, we will go onto using the next script, VMCreator.ps1