Deployment Times

[ReadTheNetwork]

Hey Edugeekers,

 

Just a quick query on how long it takes to deploy your image? At the moment I've created an image (just the OS with Windows Updates). Then depending on the computer/laptop it installs the relevant software applications as required (for example if it's in the computer collection group for Kodu such as the computer rooms for ICT it'll add Kodu).

 

I'm just wondering if approx. 1 hour and 45 mins is too long?

[mikeglover]

Quite a few things it could depend on. Not sure what system your using but as a reference it takes about 20-30mins for a laptop to build using MDT with latest updates + office in the image and then installing subject specific software afterwards can greatly increase this to over an hour. This is over Gigabit Ethernet.

If your concerned about speed. I would check via your switches if your able or some monitoring software to check what speed the NIC is negotiating at and the throughput while building. I found in the past I had a machine that had a 1000Mbit card but was imaging slow only to find during the build process in WinPE it didn't have proper network driver and only negotiating at 100Mbit. Hope this helps

[ReadTheNetwork]

Using SCCM here, I've left Office off the image because we're going to be upgrading to Office 2016 this year and thought it'll save me in the long run of building a new image again. 20-30 minutes is pretty good. I think mine should deploy faster to a laptop because it has a lot less applications to it. The deployment speed is fine, it's what I expect (as you mentioned it's the applications being installed which takes longer). But just wondering if it's 'too long'.

[mikeglover]

My longest deployments are science workstations / laptops as they have alot of software which has multimedia and video in them. 21st Century Science, Multimedia Science School, Exploring Science. They can take about 3 hours sometimes, depending on how fast the hard drive is.

 

Are you using Multicast by chance? If your doing large deployments at same time you will find it slows down quite a bit using Unicast. I've heard that with Multicast turned on deploying to a single machine is slower than Unicast. I never got Multicast to work here can decided that wasn't worth the hassle.

[just_david]

It dependson so many factors.

A newer PC With an SSD will install the basic image in as little as 30 mins, add a few more hours for all the software.

 

Doing a whole classroom with HDD's and it'll take closer to a day.

 

We Have 3 Images deploying, a standard, Solidworks, and a Maya + Visual Studio Image Deploying.

Standard is 30 mins, Solidworks about 40 and Maya about an hour. Again plus 2 hours or so for software.

 

That's using SpecOps Deploy Rather than SCCM or MDT

 

However an old PC at the wrong end of a slow switch can take over 2 days to fully install everything

[Davit2005]

25 mins for WDS/MDT deployments and that is an image for ICT with Adbbe CC, Visual Studio etc.

[free780]

A 1gbps makes a difference. Also increasingly its not the image download that takes time it's the applying that does. I tend to go with windows 10, office. Then other applications get deployed.

[davido38]

3 mins 28s for Fog deployments with a 25.4 GB image

 

 

[Michael]

Yes it's very possible it can take that long - I suspect the main imaging aspect is quick - OS with included Updates, but then applications like Kodu are relatively large.

 

For free applications like Kodu, you'd be better off including it on the base image, given it has no license requirements. Even if it's not used on other devices it doesn't really matter.

 

Typically I include the OS, latest updates and a high percentage of core applications all on the base image. Image size varies from 20-25GB typically and it takes 30 mins overall on a Gigabit connection, including the likes of Sysprep and the numerous reboots this requires.

[Davit2005]

A 1gbps makes a difference. Also increasingly its not the image download that takes time it's the applying that does. I tend to go with windows 10, office. Then other applications get deployed.

 

We have older cisco VOIP phone here with jus a 100Mb/s connection for PC. Re-Image through that takes approx 45min compared to 25 on 1Gb/s

[Michael]

All hard drives these days can do considerably more than 10MB/s a 100Mbps connection typically offers.

 

Even SSDs struggle to max a 100MB/s a 1000Mbps connection offers, which is why Gigabit makes sense in an imaging context.

 

Another consideration is your imaging server - use the wrong type of RAID can dramatically slow transfer speeds too. RAID5 or RAID6 are suitable for imaging.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Without huge software? About 45 minutes. With huge software? (x2 25GB software packages) more like 3 hours once they're done downloading them and unzipping them as part of our SCCM task sequence.

 

Our SCCM server has 3Gbps available to our core, the machines generally have around 100Mbps for laptops on a deployment bench, or 1Gbps for desktops on our access switches. We use SSDs in all our devices now, and our SCCM DP is on it's own RAID5 array.

 

I'm trying to get multicast working but hitting a problem where configuring SCCM for it seems to knock out the management point role :/

 

You can see how deployment times can vary wildly depending on the machine and what connection they have, the processors in particular make a massive difference when it comes to unzipping the two software packages.

Edited August 27, 2016 by Blue_Cookeh

[ITGURU]

All my base images are around 25GB which include office, adobe cs6 suite and other software such as acrobat, flash, realplayer, etc. I use Acronis true image for imaging, and restoring an image takes about 7 minutes on an i7 machine, 17-20 minutes on a dual core.

I then rename, join to domain, pulls down any GPO software and printers, then it's good to go.

[FragglePete]

Our base image takes approx. 30 mins on a i3 with SSD; this is Windows 10 with Office 2016 included - we're using MDT. It starts to get longer if we have to deploy Adobe CS6 & Movie Studio (site license for both) which in itself and can take 20 minutes to install (have it as an option on the MDT screen). We then finish it off with things like Impero, SIMS (if needed), a couple of scripts to set a few things up and finally Sophos followed by a few gpupdates /refresh and restarts and then we're ready. The real bugger is machines which have a Virtual Machine installed - this image we robocopy over with a script and that itself takes a fair bit of time. Obviously the more we do at once, the longer it takes so we have a tendency to set a set number off at a time (usually 10), wait for those to finish one particular phase and set the next lot off. Full on ICT Suite with CS6 and VM with 25 + 1 PCs we can do in less than half a day if they're no issues.

Did push it a bit this year and had 40 PCs on the go at once using WDS, soon as I set PC number 41 off the WDS server had a bit of melt down and essentially trashed half on the PCs that were still running on a particular phase of the script! Teach me for being impatient! My WDS server is an old physical Hp server that I retired a couple of years back but brought back into service for this particular deployment this year.

 

Pete

[ReadTheNetwork]

Thanks guys this is really useful and interesting. I do realise that doing a disk to disk image is a whole lot faster however, this isn't the route I'm aiming for. It seems like my deployment is approx. average for the similar methods used (WDS/SCCM). So I'm pretty pleased with that.

 

Out of curiosity - have you found Windows 10 deployment any faster and has anyone set up multicast through their school? I've heard this is particularly difficult. But if not I might spend some time to it and set it up.

Edited August 28, 2016 by ReadTheNetwork

[mukz]

We get speeds on average of 30mins for an ICT suite using sccm which is roughly 36gig in total. For a base image (Win7 + office 2010!) its 10mins on average. (All ssds)

 

I am going to trial multicast out and see if it will improve our deployment times.

[Michael]

Drivers can make a huge difference - but seeing as Windows 10 is packed with them, it generally will pick a suitable driver which can dramatically speed up deployment times.

[ReadTheNetwork]

mukz if you could let me know how your multicast goes I'd be interested to know

[mukz]

mukz if you could let me know how your multicast goes I'd be interested to know

 

Me too when i get to it! Too much other priorities like a 8 year old server hardware with newest being 3years old!

 

Will keep you in the loop. Hopefully my colleague at another school gets there before i do as he has same network setup as me except for ip addresses.

[Govendern]

Hi guys

 

I have deployed Windows 10, Office 365, acrobat reader and a few other packages in a win10 image using fog to 200 users multicasting. Avg time for deployment for the 15GB image is around 15mins per machine on a 1gbps network.

 

Hope this is helpful to you guys