How many sysprep's?

JonM33 · 22 Jul 2010

xarden said:

Thanks for your replies guys.
MS SCCM/MDT vs Novell Zen: The deciders have decided on Zen10. I'd prefer SCCM myself, but we have a Zen Master here who knows a bit more about them both than I do.

We have about 13 images. So I really dont want to push Adobe CS5, Visual Studio 2010, Solidworks 2010, Steam + games + SDK's, Autodesk Suite (just to name a few) to more than half of those images.

After having a look at some new processes yesterday, it appears I may have to sysprep about 3-4 times.
That should last my building process near the start of 2011 semester and any fixes/patches/new software will have to be pushed out.

Edit: Another thing, while sysprep is running and reboots first time, if I fail to capture the image before windows starts, that gold image has become useless and will need to be either sysprep'd again, or rebuilt. I'd prefer the former.

13 images? How are you organizing them? A single image should work across all of your computers. Packing all that software into an image makes a considerable image size and I'd hate to see the licensing costs.

PhreePhly · 22 Jul 2010

xarden said:

Thanks for your replies guys.
MS SCCM/MDT vs Novell Zen: The deciders have decided on Zen10. I'd prefer SCCM myself, but we have a Zen Master here who knows a bit more about them both than I do.

We have about 13 images. So I really dont want to push Adobe CS5, Visual Studio 2010, Solidworks 2010, Steam + games + SDK's, Autodesk Suite (just to name a few) to more than half of those images.

After having a look at some new processes yesterday, it appears I may have to sysprep about 3-4 times.
That should last my building process near the start of 2011 semester and any fixes/patches/new software will have to be pushed out.

Edit: Another thing, while sysprep is running and reboots first time, if I fail to capture the image before windows starts, that gold image has become useless and will need to be either sysprep'd again, or rebuilt. I'd prefer the former.

My condolences regarding using Zen.

We are stuck using here and it is an absolute resource hog. Part of that is most likely poor scricpting by our Zen Master, but most of it is simply the crappiness that is Novell Engineering.

Our new CIO should hopefully relieve us of all Novell (Client, Zen and Groupwise) software by the end of the year.

xarden · 22 Jul 2010

@JonM33, Yes. 13.
Our Arts and Design have 6. Each one may be in 1 lab, or up to 3. Just so they can have all their digital art production tools, and another lab have different software for Fashion design, etc etc.
School of engineering have their image, loaded with solidworks and altium. Stuff that only they need.
So Autodesk is only going to certain people, as is CS5, and all the other expensive tools go to whomever.
I dont work with the licensing costs, but a ballpark figure is around $1.5M per year.

Its all organised simply in folders.
I currently have a network share, with 14 folders. One for each image, plus an archive of previous years. Each folder then has subfolders (Gold, Beta, Beta2, Platinum) which contain the actual ghost image files. Sometimes more for backups... of course. Our platinums are the sysprepped images ready to be deployed to the labs.

@PhreePhly:
I've never used Zen.
I've disliked Novell since I was a lad in highschool, probably due to your reasons too.
But we have more certified Novell guys than we do Microsoft guys, so for the imaging and deployment way, this is how its going to go.

We have a couple Linux servers, but everything else is all Microsoft.

ccatlett1984 · 22 Jul 2010

PhreePhly said:

xarden said:

Thanks for your replies guys.
MS SCCM/MDT vs Novell Zen: The deciders have decided on Zen10. I'd prefer SCCM myself, but we have a Zen Master here who knows a bit more about them both than I do.

We have about 13 images. So I really dont want to push Adobe CS5, Visual Studio 2010, Solidworks 2010, Steam + games + SDK's, Autodesk Suite (just to name a few) to more than half of those images.

After having a look at some new processes yesterday, it appears I may have to sysprep about 3-4 times.
That should last my building process near the start of 2011 semester and any fixes/patches/new software will have to be pushed out.

Edit: Another thing, while sysprep is running and reboots first time, if I fail to capture the image before windows starts, that gold image has become useless and will need to be either sysprep'd again, or rebuilt. I'd prefer the former.

My condolences regarding using Zen.

We are stuck using here and it is an absolute resource hog. Part of that is most likely poor scricpting by our Zen Master, but most of it is simply the crappiness that is Novell Engineering.

Our new CIO should hopefully relieve us of all Novell (Client, Zen and Groupwise) software by the end of the year.

I agree on the novell statement. At least one good thing is that zen10 forces AD, edirectory is finally dead.