Help with MDT Toolkit Package

[Mikey C]

We have MDT integrated with our SCCM 2012 SP1 CU2.

 

We use the MDT Gather step to determine whether devices are laptops or desktops and it works fine.

 

However, on some slower hardware, slower network links, or a congested network, the MDT Toolkit Package step takes an annoyingly long time as it contains quite a large number of small files (it is not the volume of data, its the number of files that slows the process).

 

Our task sequence works great, but I would like to reduce the 2/3 minutes that this step takes.

 

Therefore, I would like to replicate with a simple self extracting zip file (which will also reduce the package from 50mb to 14mb. But, i need to know where to extract the files to, so that the MDT Gather step which runs right after will work. Can anyone advise how to do this?

 

 

Thanks.

[Mikey C]

Think i might have answer my own question here.

 

First read this post: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/11b77508-1096-4e8e-a437-6d1ddc3fc224/downloading-mdt-toolkit-in-osd-task-sequence-takes-forever

 

As I knew the MDT Toolkit package is basically a file copy, but the important bit is that it then creates some smsts variables for the resultant folders which are mentioned above. I have confirmed the names of the variables by running a script to dump the task sequence variables to a text file and comparing before and after the MDT Toolkit step. These are the relevant differences:

 

DeployRoot = C:\_SMSTaskSequence\WDPackage

ResourceRoot = C:\_SMSTaskSequence\WDPackage

ScriptRoot = C:\_SMSTaskSequence\WDPackage\Scripts

ToolRoot = C:\_SMSTaskSequence\WDPackage\Tools\X64

 

So if i add four steps into the TS to set the four TS Variables above, then set the self extracting rar file to extract to C:\_SMSTaskSequence\WDPackage (or %OSDisk%\_SMSTaskSequence\WDPackage would be better), I may have account for everything the MDT Toolkit package does.

 

Will try, and post back.