Profiles / Profile Manager -- Anyone use this to deploy?

[Gerk]

Just curious. I did some serious testing of moving to this over the summer this year and my tests concluded that it was going to prove problematic. I managed to constantly break it. Overlapping profiles that didn't override each other, broken certs and all kinds of other chaos. Push was of course a nightmare that might work for one or two pushes and then failed, I even tried to manually scp profiles and manage them with the command line and even that let me down on more than one occasion, and this was in testing with just a couple VM's and a couple real machines. I shudder to think what would have happened had I tried to seriously use this for our labs ...

 

Just wondering if anyone has deployed with this and has had better luck that I did with it and if so, what's the trick?

[-Tim]

I have been testing this off and on since last summer. They have not provided good support for integrating with Active Directory user groups. Each update states that they fixed the issue but it will still not work for me.

[stevehp]

I use it for our 1:1 program at my district. It's a love hate relationship. The biggest problem I have with it is it's such a resource hog. It eats ram and swap like a kid eats candy on Halloween. Aside from that it works just fine settings get pushed, the service has never gone down, and it's been trouble free aside from the beach balls I get when it's running slowly. I intended to drop it for next year though. We have over 1200 devices enrolled in it currently and while it will hold much more I think I need to look at purchasing more licenses for Casper or delve into Puppet for management.

 

Not sure how you had your virtual machines configured but open directory and profile manager require two cpus to function and not break into a million pieces. Open Directory Requires 2 CPUs | Krypted

Edited September 27, 2013 by stevehp

[Gerk]

I had 4 cores going on in my VM's so didn't run into issues there. It's funny that Andrina answered the question as I know her .. she's from the same area as me and we've met face-to-face a few times now. For me the issues were that push would just outright fail and once it did there was no recovering from it. Even after push failed I tested things with overlapping preferences in profiles and they were not consistent. Sometimes one would take precedence sometimes the other and no idea why as they were deployed with the exact same methods in all cases. Lastly as Tim mentioned the AD groups didn't work as expected (which is essential for my needs here).

 

Funny you mention beachballs ... I saw a lot of them on the client end of things (at login) but not much on the server ... but that said I was only running a few test machines not the hundred or so it would have been managing once deployed. At times I saw it sit and beachball at login for 30+ seconds on client machines :/

[SovietRussia]

+1 for Profile Manager - We use it to manage our iPads, its hit or miss sometimes with pushing the profiles, but its brilliant when it works. Watch the apps fly OTA onto the devices

[Gerk]

I should mention that I didn't even attempt to use it for any mobile devices, for me I was testing it for lab computers only.