Deployment and Imaging Group

Hi

Our school district is opening another school, and I need advice if I should use a separate Deployment server for that building?

Here is some background information. Right now I use DS and also NS for the campus with roughly 1800 computers.

I will only be using DS for the other building that is opening. For the most part it will be used mainly for imaging.

From the Campus to the new building is a 350 Mb wireless link.

If anyone has any suggestions, it would be appreciated.

Thanks

Doug

If it's just doing imaging, and you have an OK pipe, you could afford to simply put a PXE server in the other location, manually copy the images over there, and then manage it all locally from one DS.

That said, it's not that hard to get another server up on the other location either.  Once built, from the console, you can quickly switch from one DS to the other for management, and that might help ensure a bit less traffic over the wireless, as well as some independence for if one server fails, the other is available.

Just some thoughts.

Ultimately, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.  I think the majority of us would probably recommend just adding a PXE boot server as suggested by Thomas above.

I would definitely not recommend imaging across a WAN link though, especially if other data is sharing that bandwidth.

Regarding storing images locally, there are a few ways of handling that.  Some people use PXE redirection, others use "getsrv" (I personally use getsrv), and others use home grown scripts.

There are reasons to add another DS server, and there are reasons not to.  I would lean towards not having the additional server as it would mean one more administration point (as a sole administrator here, I don't need the additional work :D).

Thanks for the suggestions. I plan on putting a PXE server out there that will also hold the images for that building. After reading the suggestions, I am leaning toward putting in another DS. The logic behind this is that we do a lot of imaging to the lab computers, and with RDP there can only be 2 connections at one time.

Doug

You are aware that the 32 Bit console can be installed on client computers as well, right?  There is also the web portal (for simple tasks).  There is no right or wrong way of doing this, only what works best for your environment.  :)

I didn't know about the console that can be installed on a client workstation. I am going to check into this.

Thanks you for that info.

If there are only 10 to 50 computers, another ds server is not necesary. If there are more clients, then best way is to have another ds server.