Production Deployment

We started our production deployment here on May 12, and all in all I am pretty happy. There have been a couple "gotchas", but after about a year of working on this thing I have to say it has went very smoothly. One of our biggest issues here is bandwidth. Going from XP to Vista our deployment has, in most instances, trippled in size. With XP we were about 10G in size, and with Vista we are at about 30G. The problem with that is that our network infrastructure is inconsistent at best. There is nothing I can do about that and so that's the limitation that I have to deal with.

The first deployment that we did we did on an 8-port (that's what we had at the time) Gbit switch. That allowed us to do six machines at a time. Two ports were used by the net connection for windows updates and the nas for building from. Those six machines took three hours. Next we put twelve machines on a 100Mb switch. Those machines took four and a half hours. That evening we plugged the nas into the wall and started the rest of our machines (about 25). Sorry I don't have exact figures on this, but by the next morning several machines failed asking for the CD, I think 3 just failed with some deployment error, and 4-6 were still building.

So after looking at this I tried to think of different things to try to get things done faster. First off, I have to say that I am pretty happy with the loading on our nas. I don't know how well it should load, but I know that we were never able to load our old server pulling down ghost images like we are able to do on the nas (If we got more than 5 or 6 ghost sessions going some would start to fail). We are using a Qnap TS-409 Pro nas. One of the things that I thought about doing is copying the application install files down to the local machine and then have the task sequence fire them off the local hdd. Currently the installs are fired off the server/nas. I don't know if that would work in our environment because until the past year we always got the smallest hdd we could from the vendor because we did not really need any bigger drives. I also thought about other temporary network topologies, but nothing really stands out as a solution. So in the end we just opted for a 24-port Gbit switch and let em grind.

The biggest time hog for deployment/installing is Visual Studio 2008. The old version took forever to install. I think this one takes twice as long to install! This install just drives me insane. I have sat and watched the resource monitor for this install and it is just slow. First off the it looks like msiexec.exe needs to be ported over to being a multithreaded app. For most all of the VS install the processor is pegged right at 50%. (I've tried looking to see if there is any documentation on Windows Installer being either single threaded or multithreaded and I could not find anything, so I am assuming it is single threaded.) Office 2007 and CS3 take some time too, but they seem to be a fair amount better about dealing with network/cpu/hdd/memory usage for their installs. VS just seems to have a one track mind though. It is either using network or cpu or hdd, but when one spikes all the others fall off.

As for any errors that I've seen the most common one is a program give me an exit code of 13 and I cannot find a way for the deployment wizzard to accept that return code as ok. Other machines have failed up doing windows updates, which to me is not a show stopper. They will get their updates soon enough. One or two errors happened that caused us to just wipe the drive and start over. I don't remember the exact errors, but they were pretty odd ones about installing Vista and wiping the hdd did the trick.