Re: XP Deployment question
- From: "paulmd@xxxxxxx" <paulmd@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 28 Mar 2006 02:06:21 -0800
Andy Yates wrote:
Hello,
I've just started a new contract working on an XP rollout for a client. They
have about 100 PC's to upgrade from Win98 to XP Pro and told me they had
developed a standard image and just needed assistance in planning the
deployment and the physical rollout itself.
It now transpires that they have about 20 different models of unbadged
desktops and half a dozen different laptops. They were planning to lay the
same ghost image on each machine and then add extra drivers, copy the hal.dll
etc to get them to work.
Now, I've been involved in about a dozen large corporate rollouts and have
never come across this type of approach. I usually deploy a seperate image
for each model of hardware, and in a medium/large business environment they
tend to buy desktops in bulk (100's to 1000's at a time). This makes an OS
upgrade easier as there is a common platform.
What is going to be the most stable way to deploy a build in this case?
My initial feeling is that there isn't going to be one image as the client
thinks, but dozens - it's going to be down dictated by common motherboard
chipset and CPU etc.
I have a feeling they are up against it here, however it means that my
contract may run longer than I thought.
Any thought or ideas please.
PS - the client is a registered charity, and the option of a complete
hardware refresh is not an option.
100 isn't so bad to do manually. Since 90% of the time an in install is
waiting for stuff to happen, you can do multiples at once. Maybe an
autoinstaller, and a few slipstreamed CDs. Dragoon a few charity
workers in to pressing the enter key at the appropriate spots.
Considering you have 26 different kinds, this works out to be an
average of 4 of each kind. If you have sets of maybe 5 or 10 of a kind,
then you can image those. The onesies and twosies, just load manually.
I know what you mean about charities, I work at a Microsoft Authorised
Refurbisher, The hardware we get is to put it mildly, ecclectic (anyone
interested in a a SGI Indy, or Indigo, NeXTstation, or a funky German
MIPS machine so obscure we can't even find an OS we can put on it?).
Hand loads are more effective when the hardware is utterly random, and
is of questionable reliability (you miss hardware problems when you
clone that make themselves utterly obvious when you're hand -loading).
Sometimes we get a corporate donation of Identical machines, and we can
image.
.
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