Deployment 101

ally_uk

Hi guys how we all doing? I work for a small charity based in the UK I wont go into to much detail about the business apart from we deal and process donated computer equipment and refurbish it for reuse.

I want to speed up the productivity of the place and am looking at the deployment side of things, currently we have no deployment structure in place and all the machines are setup manually which of course we all know is a massive waste of resources and time.

So I am thinking setting up some kind of deployment infrastructure would be the right direction to go in, We mainly process and work with Windows XP Machines. There are some concepts of the Deployment process which I need help in getting my head around.

Firstly if you have 100 thinkpad machines, what would be the easiest way to image one machine and then to roll it out to the rest? bearing in mind we're not using a site liscense for the operating system here so the product key will differ on each machine.

Secondly we get alot of hardware in which differs, what I mean is the motherboard and hardware would be physically different from each other, is there any possible way of imaging these machines and rolling them out? Or am I right in saying you would need to ensure all the hardware is the same.

What is the best approach to take setup a Server? or just use imaging software

Many Thanks For your help I appreciate it

Pash

So you have 100 desktops with OEM licenses splattered about?

Do your laptops have any encryption software on them?

I can't recommend Altiris enough. I have used it for mass image/application deployment with multiple complexed steps for some application installs. Altiris will work using PXE enabled NIC's on your devices and only requires a small low resource hogging agent on your endpoint devices.

The only issue I can see you will have is if you create an image using one OEM dvd, the same key will be accross all of your instances. Which is not good. I am fairly sure if you have a VL key though aslong as the units were all purchased with XP OEM professional licenses you are covered.

ally_uk

Hey I don't think the windows Liscense on the machines are oem, they are the COA's we sometimes get batches of dells or IBM's all the same i.e same hardware, also we get unbranded different machines with different hardware but they could all have windows xp home or professional liscenses on the case.

tpatt100

Having all those different types of machines would make imaging more work than it's worth imo. When I worked for the city each department had it's own IT budget for machines so upgrades would happen as a machine broke and was out of warranty, when the budget was approved for Ghost Enterprise I was ending up with an image for each machine vs a standard image for all or even a minority of machines.

phonetic.man

I run WDS off of a 2K8R2 VM at work and love it.
For each computer I make a standard image (OS, drivers, openoffice, flash, etc.) and I then make specific images for the end user(s) if necessary (My Vocational department has the Adobe CS Master Collection and Library has math and science programs).

I do this because some departments have money and most don't. So when I replace a computer lab, I reimage the machines with my standard image and I'm ready to roll out the old computers to new places.

Now if I could only talk the big bosses into VDI for the 90% of computers that only need basic functionality (office and internet) that would be sweet.