Re: OT: But only a little...
- From: "Steve Foster [SBS MVP]" <steve.foster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:35:31 -0700
Gordon wrote:
I need some serious honest feedback here.
Is it possible to install a SBS2003 box and 20 pc's in a single day?
Based on: 9:00am - 5:30pm work day and doing it correctly.
And could you do this 5 days a week.
Why am I asking? Sales person running an IT company says this is possible.... I pass it across to the techies..
I say it's not possible....
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "doing it correctly".
A full SBS installation is around half a day (of which most is just the SBS installation doing its' "thang"). Then you need to bring it up-to-date on patches, which would probably take another 2 hours (assuming decent bandwidth). You might get the patching done slightly quicker, if you've obtained all the relevant patches in advance.
You could be installing Windows XP Pro from scratch on 10 clients in the meantime, as a full Windows install is about 1 hour, but again most of that time is Windows installing itself. They'd probably just about all be done by the time SBS was done installing. Note at this stage that none of them would have joined the domain.
An alternative strategy for deploying the clients would be to add RIS to the SBS, and spend about 30 minutes loading the XP Pro CD (can't be OEM though) onto the SBS - each client could then be auto-deployed (subject to their nics being recognised OOB by XP Pro!). At this number of clients, RIS would certainly be something I'd want to use if possible.
All the above would result in bare XP Pro machines being on the network and attached to the SBS, just about in time to go home. But there'd be no applications installed - no Office, no Accounting s/w, no Adobe Reader, no WinZip, nada.
Deploying the core applications like Office and Adobe Reader via GPO would be the fastest method, but it still involves probably an hour to get this configured and going.
So, in essence, if you know exactly what you're doing, and have it all carefully planned in advance, you might manage it in a day (though getting done by 17:30 would only be possible if the h/w was ready to work on at 09:00 - if you have to unpack & wire up, that alone could take 2-3 hours for 1 server + 20 clients!). But your margin for error would be zero.
A much better plan would be to assume two days - day one for the server, day two for client setup. You could then be calmly unpacking and wiring up the clients on day one while the SBS was installing, and spend half the morning on day two preparing s/w for client deployment (eg building RIS images, setting up GPO) then be having a nice lunch with the customer while the clients mostly auto-deploy, before applying finishing touches in the afternoon.
-- Steve Foster [SBS MVP] --------------------------------------- MVPs do not work for Microsoft. Please reply only to the newsgroups. .
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