Once your image is baked, you can take it and deploy it with SCCM or MDT or even give it to an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to have placed on your computers purchased from them before you receive them. The process for baking an image is generally this:
- An environment is created that is off the production network. This is usually a virtualized environment and can even be all on a single host. Standalone Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and artificial subnet with a NAT rule for the MDT host is preferred.
- A virtual machine is created that hosts the MDT server, 4 GB of RAM and a few processors is typically sufficient for image-creation purposes. A server OS is preferred for MDT but it can run on a client OS ...