Microsoft Signature Edition
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Of course if you can use an image to deploy the machines you'll save a ton of time. Create the first machine get all the windows updates on it (don't join it to a domain) then sysprep it, take an image, deploy to machine2, etc.. Even if you only install Office, often deploying an image takes less time than installing Office alone.
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@Dashrender said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Of course if you can use an image to deploy the machines you'll save a ton of time. Create the first machine get all the windows updates on it (don't join it to a domain) then sysprep it, take an image, deploy to machine2, etc.. Even if you only install Office, often deploying an image takes less time than installing Office alone.
I was going to recommend this but you got to it before me. At my old location we would purchase 100 desktops at a time (a school) they always came with Dell's crapware installed. Spending the two hours to setup a good image and then deploying it with FOG saved me days of work. I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Are they the same machines? Do you have imaging rights?
Often just putting Windows installer onto a USB key is ideal. Once you take the few minutes to do that, installs are super fast and take little interaction. That's the best (that I've seen) for doing one off installs.
If you have imaging rights it takes more time to prep BUT you can automatically blast out builds and rebuilds anytime that you want. It's worth the investment.
What's really nice is that uninstalling apps is a "do it every time" activity. But imaging or having the USB key ready is a "prep it once, use it over and over" activity so when you need to do rebuilds of the machines down the road, you are all prepared for it.
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@Dashrender said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
Of course if you can use an image to deploy the machines you'll save a ton of time. Create the first machine get all the windows updates on it (don't join it to a domain) then sysprep it, take an image, deploy to machine2, etc.. Even if you only install Office, often deploying an image takes less time than installing Office alone.
Yeah, adding packages, customizations and whatever to a base image makes that process even more valuable as you can get a lot of other work done as a part of the process "for free."
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@coliver said:
I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
That is impressive. What do you store the image on? I will definitely check out FOG.
I don't buy PCs in bulk. The most I would ever get is around ten at a time, so imaging isn't worth it for me. I can setup around five an hour, so at most I'm spending a couple of hours or so at a time.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@coliver said:
I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
That is impressive. What do you store the image on? I will definitely check out FOG.
I don't buy PCs in bulk. The most I would ever get is around ten at a time, so imaging isn't worth it for me. I can setup around five an hour, so at most I'm spending a couple of hours or so at a time.
It was hosted on a VNXe 3300 NAS, but FOG supports multicasting so it was only sending the image out once.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@coliver said:
I could image an entire lab, 40-50 computers, in ~30 minutes if I had a good image already.
That is impressive. What do you store the image on? I will definitely check out FOG.
I don't buy PCs in bulk. The most I would ever get is around ten at a time, so imaging isn't worth it for me. I can setup around five an hour, so at most I'm spending a couple of hours or so at a time.
Unless those 10 devices each need to be setup differently - totally different software packages, imaging is still totally worth it. You spend 1 hour setting up the golden machine, take an image to a NAS or fileshare with Clonezilla, then blast it back to each of the other 9.
If you don't have WSUS you'd be spending 9x more bandwidth downloading updates alone.
By imaging you know all 10 machines are identical except when you provide the computer names during the mini post SYSPREP setup.I'd argue that it's worth imaging if you have only two identical machines you are setting up.
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@Dashrender said:
Unless those 10 devices each need to be setup differently - totally different software packages, imaging is still totally worth it. You spend 1 hour setting up the golden machine, take an image to a NAS or fileshare with Clonezilla, then blast it back to each of the other 9.
I did employ my MSP to do that last year. It took him days. Part of the problem was it was trying to transfer that image over a single cable to ten different PCs. That's about 300GB data I'd guess? He was just sitting there all day whilst I was paying him $100+ an hour. I sacked him and did the next ten my way in around 2 hours - of course, I was working my butt off during those two hours, but I got it done fast.
Of course he may just have been an idiot.
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He was clearly doing something wrong!
300 GB what the heck do you have to install? My normal installs are around 30 GB, they take around 13 mins to copy over gig-e (or less).
Try the process once yourself - during which if you have questions, please ask - if you find it still doesn't suit you, fine keep doing it the way you have been.
If you don't like it, you've learned a process to avoid, if you like it - you've learned a skill that should save you tons of time.
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@Dashrender said:
He was clearly doing something wrong!
300 GB what the heck do you have to install? My normal installs are around 30 GB, they take around 13 mins to copy over gig-e (or less).
Try the process once yourself - during which if you have questions, please ask - if you find it still doesn't suit you, fine keep doing it the way you have been.
If you don't like it, you've learned a process to avoid, if you like it - you've learned a skill that should save you tons of time.
He didn't have multicast setup so a 30GB image would become 300GB over the entire process. Not sure what tool he was using, if your switches don't support multicast FOG had an option to only do 2-3 at a time and queue the rest of them. Worked very well. It can take a significant amount of additional time but overall still better then doing it by hand. If you can't tell I loved using FOG took a bit of time to setup and configure exactly for our network but after that everything was awesome... although to be fair they migrated to Dell KACE after I left.
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OK true on the 300 GB total, but still I can do 5 machines at a time with Clonezilla in under 20 mins, so assuming I have a 1 GB switch 6 ports (one for NAS/server, the rest for PCs) other than building the image and taking the original image, you should be able to roll out the new machines in about 1 hour.
Also, depending how often you are deploying 10 computers at once, it's completely reasonable that you could reuse an image from one machine on another. Even if you have to update a driver here or there, then take a new image, you've saved yourself all the time of starting that image from scratch.
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@Dashrender said:
OK true on the 300 GB total, but still I can do 5 machines at a time with Clonezilla in under 20 mins, so assuming I have a 1 GB switch 6 ports (one for NAS/server, the rest for PCs) other than building the image and taking the original image, you should be able to roll out the new machines in about 1 hour.
Also, depending how often you are deploying 10 computers at once, it's completely reasonable that you could reuse an image from one machine on another. Even if you have to update a driver here or there, then take a new image, you've saved yourself all the time of starting that image from scratch.
We always had an enterprise version of Windows, again worked in a school so the price was basically non-existent, does the Pro version also offer imaging rights?
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@coliver said:
We always had an enterprise version of Windows, again worked in a school so the price was basically non-existent, does the Pro version also offer imaging rights?
If you purchase one copy of Volume License Windows (which until recently was only available as Windows Pro) you get imaging rights for your entire enterprise.
You do not need to purchase Software Assurance or the Enterprise Edition.
Sometime last year Microsoft removed the Enterprise version use from Software Assurance and made it its own SKU in Volume Licensing. Some customers where unhappy they had to continuously pay for SA to get Windows Enterprise, but if you found yourself needing both SA and Enterprise, you now found yourself paying I think I recall hearing it was nearly double.
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
We always had an enterprise version of Windows, again worked in a school so the price was basically non-existent, does the Pro version also offer imaging rights?
If you purchase one copy of Volume License Windows (which until recently was only available as Windows Pro) you get imaging rights for your entire enterprise.
Yes, it's a single volume license that is all that is needed for imaging rights and Pro is enough for that. It's the volume license, though, not that it is Pro that does this. If you get Pro some other way you do not get imaging rights.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I have a couple of machine to setup this week - I might time both approaches and see which is quicker and most hassle free.
OK, I've attempted to do this.
Firstly, my usual technique of just uninstalling crapware. From powering on the PC for the first time to having it on and ready for production took 14 minutes and 50 seconds.
Secondly, doing a fresh OS install. This took 13 minutes and 40 seconds. I then had to download and install the HP drivers. I downloaded the network card driver first and then installed and ran HP Softpaq Download Manager to do the rest. This took ages. Mainly because, for whatever reason, our connection to ftp.hp.com is always dog slow. Nothing else on the internet is ever anywhere near as slow as downloading from HP. I don't know if this is just my site, or the UK, or whatever, but it is really slow. I get about 70KB/s and there's several hundred meg to download. I don't know how long it took because I went and did something else. But apart from the speed, the Download Manager works very well. I've had a nightmare in the past with Lenovo's equivalent.
It's not a massive problem for me, because I can leave it running and do something else. What do you service providers do? @scottalanmiller says he's charging $120 an hour for consulting time. That would really add up if he was on-site waiting for drivers to download. I've paid consultants to sit around waiting for downloads before and it really pisses me off.
Anyway, will I change my approach? Possibly. Like I said above, I've never had an issue with uninstalling crapware. You all have. If I had issues I would definitely switch practices. HP don't come with much crapware (Norton wasn't on there, the AV was Microsoft Security Essentials, which I uninstalled), but their driver download software is also very good. If I was dealing with other manufacturers I might have a different opinion. As it is, both approaches take about the same amount of time and effort, so I'd be equally happy doing either. 14 minutes is pretty quick. A clean OS install probably took around 25 minutes, excluding download times, which is slower but not by much.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
It's not a massive problem for me, because I can leave it running and do something else. What do you service providers do? @scottalanmiller says he's charging $120 an hour for consulting time. That would really add up if he was on-site waiting for drivers to download. I've paid consultants to sit around waiting for downloads before and it really pisses me off.
Desktop support is that cheap, not me. The thing is you need these drivers already in case a machine needs to be rebuilt. So this is not wasted time. Also, it is a one time download for all of your machines, so it can't be thought of as part of the cost of a single unit.
If you were hiring consultants, you could easily download these files and put them on USB before they arrive.
But the big savings is in support over time. But it adds up from all of these things. A one time download, that is needed anyway, to get overall higher speed and peace of mind and lower support costs for the future.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I've paid consultants to sit around waiting for downloads before and it really pisses me off.
Everyone in IT gets paid to do downloads, it's part of the job. Why do you get upset when someone is a consultant rather than a standard employee getting paid? Why the ire against consultants being compensated for the same work that employees get compensated for? $120 is less than I get paid as an employee and I get paid to download and install things all of the time.
Consultants need to pay their bills just like everyone else.
Why do you get upset with this and not with them doing a software install or other task? What makes downloads special?
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A good consultant would have things planned out before they get onsite for this type of work. A good plan and doing some work ahead of time, especially if a client has a slow connection saves everyone time and frustration. However we would still get paid to do the work. Do you get paid to do IT? Why wouldn't a Service Provider get paid to do the same thing?
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@Minion-Queen said:
However we would still get paid to do the work. Do you get paid to do IT? Why wouldn't a Service Provider get paid to do the same thing?
Look at it another way, does your boss get upset when he finds out that you, as an IT employee, sometimes download things at work, or get coffee, or take lunch? How would you feel if you found out that he complained about his employees sometimes needing to do "easy" tasks or "having to wait for things" as part of their jobs. Even if he still paid you like he should, would you be happy knowing that he was upset about you doing a necessary part of your jobs, and one that he mandated that you do?
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@Minion-Queen said:
A good consultant would have things planned out before they get onsite for this type of work. A good plan and doing some work ahead of time, especially if a client has a slow connection saves everyone time and frustration.
However, this can be tough as many clients only want to pay for work done onsite, under supervision. So prep work is sometimes refused. Actually very often. So things like downloads end up being mandated to be done on site, quite often.
