Automated OS and software deployment management ?

[albertwt]

Hi All,

 

We are trying to work out whether or not to purchase SCCM 2012 or some other technology to assist with desktop/server fleet management. Today have many disparate systems that all do a subset of what we need. In addition to that we have Windows 7 upcoming and need to deploy it and hundreds of application packages.

 

The new technology MUST:

Deploy Windows 7 to any bare bones machine (including driver insertion)

Deploy Windows 2008 to any bare bones machine regardless (including driver insertion)

Deploy Software from MSI

Deploy Software from Non-MSI (flat file, single registry key, third party installer)

Deploy Software based on Active Directory Group Membership

Deploy Software with ‘pre-requisites and supersedes’ smarts built in

Deploy Windows Security Patches

Deploy Windows Security Patches with respect to groups (ie node A is patched fully before node B is patched)

Ability to Permanently exclude Security Patches that are irrelevant to a system

Ability to Disapprove a Security Patches

Report on Windows Security Patch Gaps

Report on software deployments for licensing compliance

Support a replicated Multi-tiered infrastructure deployments (Internal, DMZ-I, DMZ-E info all in the same Microsoft SQL database)

Be supported by the supplying vendor on a vmware platform

Provide a configuration management database that lets you put manual descriptions hardware, asset and IP addressing information in

 

The new technology SHOULD:

Allow you to Add/Remove things from an SOE without having to recreate SOE from scratch.

Deploy user based software that installs on first run instead of installing all your apps upon first log in

Allow administrative removal of an application from a machine when you’re out of a group

Automatically associate users to machines based on the last log on

Report on hardware inventory

Report on software inventory

Report on user to machine inventory

Not require the user to have local administrative privileges

 

Any kinds of suggestion and input will be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[bio]

You might take a look at Landesk Management suite 9 as well. We have good experiences with it but are no large organization with many sites (however it does support that)

 

bio..

[Deanuk]

Just looking at this myself and will be getting a quote this afternoon on it, really intrigued.

[Gatt]

Personally, I would go with SCCM (currently 2007 R3) as it can do pretty much everything you want

It ties in with WDS for OS deployment, and also with WSUS for windows updates - which then allows you to control what updates should go out and when.

I use AppDeploy to create MSI's for non-MSI based software

OS deployment are controled via Task Sequences which also allow comtrol of drivers

Full Inventory of Hardware and Software

It can also be used for multiple sites - though I haven't implemented this

I would also recommend using Native Mode if you can create a PKI infrastructure

[qcomer]

+2 for SCCM. I am currently running MDT/WDS and would love to upgrade to SCCM after using a trial and seeing what it can do. If it was my choice I would go for it in a heartbeat with no questions asked (especially considering the cost is very minimal).