Capturing and Deploying Mac OSX

[Scottyboy99]

Evening all,

I have the pleasure of setting up our new iMacs (24 of them) with Mountain Lion and software such as Office, Final Cut pro, Adobe CS3, AutoDesk etc.

Now, instead of going round each one and installing the software manually, it there anyway of setting up one and capturing it to deploy to the others (like WDS)?

We have a Mac OSX Lion Server to deploy the image from if that helps?

Any help appreciated,

Cheers

Scott

[clareq]

Look at deploy studio Home

[Rozzer]

Deploy studio without a doubt is your friend

Ross

[mdench]

+1 for deploy studio managed to get it working this summer and today is deployment day!

[localzuk]

Indeed, DeployStudio is what I am using at the moment. However, it is pretty slow compared to imaging a Windows machine (in our case with Fog).

[JR-PCS]

Indeed, DeployStudio is what I am using at the moment. However, it is pretty slow compared to imaging a Windows machine (in our case with Fog).

Are you multicasting your deploystudio images and if you are, have you set an appropriate speed for multicasting? Deploystudio is no slower than anything else out there if you configure it correctly. I suppose other bottlenecks could be a slow ethernet connection going to your netboot server, or using a mac mini server which only has a 2.5" SATA 7200rpm HD, instead of a SAS based Xserve or Mac Pro.

[localzuk]

Are you multicasting your deploystudio images and if you are, have you set an appropriate speed for multicasting? Deploystudio is no slower than anything else out there if you configure it correctly. I suppose other bottlenecks could be a slow ethernet connection going to your netboot server, or using a mac mini server which only has a 2.5" SATA 7200rpm HD, instead of a SAS based Xserve or Mac Pro.

Nope, just doing unicast. We have a Mac Mini Server doing the job, but at the same time it has better spec than our Fog server. The Fog server will max a 100Mb connection to deploy an image (or more precisely, it'll do 10 machines at once). I only get 12Mbps when using DeployStudio. It takes about 50 minutes to deploy a dual boot system, total image size around 50gb. Fog will do 10 machines at once in half that - all unicast. If I try and do 2 machines at once? The speed halves.

I've checked that I have the server plugged into a 1Gbit port (its plugged into our core switch, just like the Fog server).

[JR-PCS]

Not sure why yours is so slow, but that is not normal for Deploystudio. I'm sure I often get up to 50mbps from a mac mini and more from an Xserve.

[Carter]

+1 for DS

Here is one of my labs the other day