I've been tasked with installing Windows XP SP3 to approximately 500 desktop machines (almost all will be the same model, but not all. I'll deal with drivers later, once I know how to start).

I might have a WDS, but I need to prepare as I won't have it. I have previously used nLite to install unattended, but that was on a much smaller scale. I'm considering to use MDT 2010 SP1 (never used any version), but haven't found a good tutorial from one that actually used it for XP SP3 (not just MS documentation). Another thing is I most probably won't have a VL key, but a unique one for each machine.

I'd appreciate any suggestion as to how to approach this, links to resources, better yet tutorials would be greatly appreciated.

I have previously used nLite to install unattended, but that was on a much smaller scale.

And hopefully also in a non Commercial Environment...

jaclaz

Using MDT 2010 for XP deployment is fairly simple, and not really different from deploying any other OS. Also, deploying Windows XP with a default key (based on the type of install - retail is what you're using, I'd guess, if you're talking about a key per install) or no key at all isn't necessarily difficult either via MDT. The last reason I'd suggest MDT is because you can use WDS to deploy (by putting the .wim it creates on the WDS server), but you can also create offline media of the same exact deployment share as well, so if you ultimately don't have WDS, you won't have to redo anything to deploy with removable media.