Here’s a tip for all your MDT fans and those of you who need a portable MDT 2012 deployment solution on your laptop. I’m not talking a USB-stick that you install from but I’m talking creating a VM on your laptop that you can bring to branch offices, customers and even friends without any need for additional infrastructure such as Active Directory etc. At last! Now you can promise your best friend to re-install their computer… but don’t need to spend the whole evening doing it but instead spend more time drinking beer and playing XBOX.
As a base I will use my Windows 8 laptop. Why not Windows 7? Because it enables you to run Hyper-V on it. I will create a dedicated VM running MDT 2012 on Windows Server 2012. Why a VM running 2012 and not 2008 R2? Because the Windows Deployment Services in 2012 does not require Active Directory and can run in standalone mode. So when you install MDT in your laptop, choose:
Then you can simply follow my guide on installing MDT 2012 on Windows 2012.