Desktop Deployment Methods - What method do you employ?

[ctbjs]

This is just a general query as I have seen many varying ways in which this is done within the school environment and thought that by raising this topic we may be able to formulate a standard of best practise for our schools so that we can all do this the best way.

 

Personally I have RIS installed on a server and use this purely for the PXE environment, I then use ghost 7.0...yes ghost 7.0 to create images and use the multicast option so that i can do a whole room at once. \well, I did until I came to my present school where the jerkovs have, for some reason, disable multicasting on the switches as well as password protecting them and not left the all important passwords. I could reset them during the summer I suppose but FFS.

 

Anyway what solution do you guys employ and does it work for you?

[ChrisH]

Fully automated flat RIS image. All awkward apps are deployed on an automatic first boot using silent installers and/or autoit scripts.

[Ric_]

WDS all the way (should really use is new name after all).

[GrumbleDook]

Still using RIS until the lads have worked out if there will be issues swapping to WDS

[tosca925]

Still ising RIS here as well, we have set up WDS but as of yet we have not created any images yet.

[john]

WDSing

[contink]

WDS-legacy myself...

 

Working ok but proving problematic with some NICs... but that's a hardware issue

[ThatBoringBloke]

WDS in leagacy mode, then into ghost corp 10.

[StewartKnight]

thinking about NetRunna, but it's expensive!

[limbo]

HP / Toshiba recovery CD's when needed - but I think this is only two desktops this year that have needed reinstalling.

 

All software is pushed out through MSI's so the basic XP install is enough.

 

I am curious - how often do you guys find you need to reinstall a PC - it is not enough here to justify spending any time setting something like RIS or WDS up. We used to use Ghost under Windows 98 but under XP we just have not found the need.

 

Or is it something that is just done as a matter of course every few months to keep the PC's healthy?

 

I realise how the above might sound patronising - but it is meant as a genuine question as there maybe something I am missing.

[_Bat_]

Meh, we do it quite a slow way, but it works for us as primary schools.

 

We build the image, sysprep it, then use BartPE to copy the image to the server. Then we use BartPE on all the other machines to copy the image across to them. On a large amount of PCs, we'd normally get three or four BartPE CDs and do three or four at a time. Slow, but works

[daveyboy]

ZenWorks

 

@limbo

 

We have 7 computer suites - and some very inventive students.

 

As a possible average - about once every 4-5 weeks.

 

Although - ZenWorks makes this so easy!! 8)

[ajbritton]

RIS/WDS for OS then GPO for software.

[limbo]

We have 7 computer suites - and some very inventive students.

 

We have 19 computer suites so size is possible not the factor here - what kind of things do your "inventive students" get up to?

[daveyboy]

@limbo

 

I've PM'd you.

[eduabncs]

We have 7 computer suites - and some very inventive students.

 

We have 19 computer suites so size is possible not the factor here - what kind of things do your "inventive students" get up to?

 

Limbo..your at a girls school so that explains a lot. You and AlanD have it easy in that regard.

[limbo]

@eduabncs - perhaps you are right, but we do have some of the male species in our Sixth form who get up to a few things.

[Rozzer]

Using Ghost 8 works brilliant can't complain

[Oops_my_bad]

Hi Daveyboy

 

Is zenworks quite good then? I was looking at it but pricing is somewhat prohibitive :/

[riedquat]

We use Zenworks 7 here too, as for pricing take a look at the Schools Licence Agreement http://www.novell.com/licensing/academic/sla.html

 

It's an annual renewal with costs based on either workstation count or student enrolment AT TIME OF RENEWAL (whichever works out cheaper) staff accounts are included for free. We base ours on a student enrolment of 1000 for the bundle of OES (licenced for upto 1000 servers) , Zenworks Desktop Management & Groupwise at a value of 2 points per student. Each point is $1 so our annual fee is $2000, which is roughly £1000. Plus, all slected products come with full version upgrade maintenance for the duration of the agreement.

 

List of applicable products is http://www.novell.com/licensing/contracts/sla_exhibita_emea.pdf

[Oakie]

Ghostcast. I am a computer teacher in a lab with 36 computers and we have no onsite tech support. I experimented a little and found imaging to be a very simple and quick solution.

Fortunately the computers are all the same make and model. At the beginning of the year I rebuild a new or updated image with all the service packs and new software. Then I multicast the image to the lab machines. 20 minutes later it's done. Fast, easy, reliable method for the last 3 years.

[kingswood]

Ghost, RIS, and on some a simple CD. I am starting to move our Ghost images to an RIS deployment method over half-term- that way we get the benefits of using our existing Ghost images with PXE.

[ChrisPal]

We are using Windows Deployment Services with server running in legacy mode. So RIS, yep.

See also this WAIK User's guide.

But the small problem with the deployment for us is the troubles with configuration management. Our network is very heterogeneous. I can't recall the moment we weren't in transition. New people come, we purchase new hardware that already uses new kind of software. But we also need to keep all these old stuff working because it's all in business. Surely it creates specific problems. Mostly because I need to keep out network in a state that is certified by internal rules. The organization wants users to have their desktops look standard to not confuse the basic operations, to avoid all these questions about "how do I write my document? I need to send it to my collegues right know". So basically we create a standard masted image of OS with several general applications such as Office preinstalled. At the same time different hardware requires different software, unfortunately. This all requires keeping several images on the server and that's surely not a handy thing.

As for the topic what we do afer deploying the OS onto computers, we deploy applications. We are using group policies to deploy MSI packages throught the departments. I would say it's not that easy as it seems from the wording when you first start thinking about deployment. The most complex moment is again connected to the distribution of the software across the domain. While we deploy the standard images onto equal hardware, the problem here is to supply departments with different software specific for the tasks people do there. That involves the need to script the distribution. I can't said that it was always possible to me to automate deploying speicific configurations for all cases. Sometimes I am unable to automate the configurations because such complex scritping is out of my scope and it takes to much to build it. I would prefer the way to configure the OS image after deploying it to users. I heard somewhere Scriptlogic offers something similar but I haven't any opportunity to work with it yet. If anyone of you have worked with it I will be interested in hearing from you.

To the point, does some of you have any experience in implementing such operations? What's best practice for you?

By the way, there's a good article explaining what's new in WDS against the basic RIS you might want to read.

[alexkeller]

Well, I have some experience with memebership-based deployment. We are using the Desktop Authority management tool from Scriptlogic for that. I guess, you are probably talking about ability to configure the desktop configuration on the fly.

[ChrisPal]

Great to hear from the one experienced. Yes, I guess, I am talking about that. Look, the problem like I see it now is that I need configure dektops on the user side manually to install all the set of applications specific for the user I just don't know who it should be called in terms of desktop management. What do you call 'on-the-fly' here?

Currently I am using these steps to apply software to the specific user/group. So the scheme is create OU/group, create GPO, link to the OU, edit GPO to specify security filtering, refresh gpo.