Deployment Solution

 View Only
  • 1.  Regular HII vs DeployAnywhere

    Posted Feb 25, 2009 02:18 AM
    Hi

    Couple of questions I hoped someone would be able to answer for me.

    1) What are the pro's and con's of both methods?

    2) If I use DeployAnywhere do i still need to prepare the images with sysprep in the capture job and select the sysprep option in the distribution job?

    Cheers

    Robert


  • 2.  RE: Regular HII vs DeployAnywhere

    Posted Mar 13, 2009 06:30 AM
    I am also interested in this question and, being new to SP1, I was hoping somebody else was going to answer this! But I will have a go.

    As far as I can tell, the old (regular?) way of doing HII is no longer available once you've installed SP1 and DeployAnywhere. But not much has changed. Both systems require sysprep, answer files, and a drivers database. The old way was to tell Sysprep where your drivers were stored, in the sysprep advanced settings when creating an image. These settings have disappeared in SP1, as DeployAnywhere looks after the Driver store.

    Before SP1, your entire driver store would copy in to the actual image to be deployed (e.g C:\Drivers). Or you could run a script after imaging, to copy only the correct drivers from your driver archive (this is called FIRM injection).

    The new way of deploying HII images is that 'DeployAnywhere' fetches the correct NIC driver from DriversDB folder on DS share, and Windows detects and installs the rest of the hardware (if you're deploying Windows)! DeployAnywhere gives you a GUI to manage the drivers list (on the Tools menu in DS console) but it can only manage NIC drivers and HALs.

    Despite the claimed improved support for HII under SP1, the DeployAnywhere solution is a half-hearted offering. Personally I have found it easier to avoid HII altogether as it's much simpler (for me) to stick with hardware-specific images. I am looking for HII to be a fully automated process, but I have not achieved this with my initial testing. The most frustrating thing is that it was possible to have a good system that worked the old way, but once you've installed SP1 you get a lame solution and there's no going back.

    ~Mike~