Deployment Solution

Hi,

I was hoping some of the DS experts can perhaps help me with a few questions.

We are currently in the process of setting up a DS server in our main site (Site1) and will be using it to push our new Windows 7 SOE and software out to all desktops and laptops in the next couple of months.

We also have 14 other site locations all connecting back to us with a variaty of connections from 10Mbit fibre to 256K satelite connections. So as you can see some and are fast and some slow. Each of these sites have their own DC and each one of these DC's acts as a Altiris Site Server as well.

My question is how will I manage the push of this new SOE to all my smaller sites considering how big the images are. Do I need to install a DS on each one of my site servers? How do I manage the sites when we drop connection to them while doing new builds in the future?

Is there a best practise document I can read that will explain my options to me when there is so many other sites involved.

I have been told that the one DS will be enough.

Once I get my head around this I will post some more questions.

Thanks

Hi,

I am currently operaing a DS environment with a few sites, so I thought if I could help!

You can setup the only the PXE component of DS at remote sites, for which you can utilize DCs.

You can ship your windows soe on a DVD and ask someone to copy to the server if it is a slow link, then you can change the job created for locations to point to the local site servers.

If it is a fast link, you can use the NS infra (if you have) to replicate the SOE just as a package.

-V

As always, there is more than one way to skin a cat!

My preference would be to control the distribution of your images centrally. For this you can use RoboCopy which will honour bandwidth limitations enabling you to sync your images overnight or over the weekend.

Here is a post where this was recently brought up,

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/bandwidth-usage-when-create-image-task-executed

DVD's are OK, but if you must go down that route perhaps a USB disk is an option to consider too. It can often be frustrating writing several DVDs for image store refreshes, and with the occasional write/read problems it can sometimes be downright painful!

Next thing to consider is is where to dump such images so they are available to your remote sites. Following the above advice to deploy remote PXE servers  (very sensible) you'll need to create an additional share (say images)on these server so that you can image off them.

This means you'll need to map a generic drive within you PXE environment, for example if using WinPE/DOS:

N:\ maps to \\%ALTIRIS_PXE_IP%\images

And then you'll have your imaging jobs deploy from the N:\ drive

This way you have one PXE automation image which will work across all your remote sites.

Kind Regards,
Ian./