XP Deployment question

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Guest

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.


Thanks,

Andy
 
Andy Yates said:
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.


Thanks,

Andy
Click to expand...

Using a "standard" image on different hardware platforms is going to
be trouble - especialy if there are large differences in chipsets
etc, you should explain this to them.
You could well spend more time resolving BSODs etc, [some may not even
boot to the desktop], than it would take to do fresh installs, in
particular the Notebooks would be a challenge.
All I can offer is try and find a group of machines with close/simillar
HW and make an image for them.

good luck
rgds
Roberto
 
Andy said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
That's what i have started planning, we can probably get it down to a dozen
inages in total and they will all be stable platforms.

The only other suggestion has been to make a standard image on any old
platform and before using sysprep remove the mass storage controllers, the
ACPI multiprocessor PC (or equivalent), the USB root hubs and any other
mainboard devices etc from device manager. Then run the seal on syysprep,
shut down the pc and take the image. When another platform boots up into this
image and starts building it will detect the different devices it has without
so much risk of a BSOD.

Not sure about this route, it appears it will save time now but it seems a
bit messy to me - anyone have thoughts on this method?


Thanks,

Andy


Roberto said:
Andy Yates said:
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.


Thanks,

Andy
Click to expand...

Using a "standard" image on different hardware platforms is going to
be trouble - especialy if there are large differences in chipsets
etc, you should explain this to them.
You could well spend more time resolving BSODs etc, [some may not even
boot to the desktop], than it would take to do fresh installs, in
particular the Notebooks would be a challenge.
All I can offer is try and find a group of machines with close/simillar
HW and make an image for them.

good luck
rgds
Roberto
Click to expand...
 
Andy said:
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.


Thanks,

Andy
Click to expand...

You could use RIS but it would probably take longer to get it working than
just installing XP manually. I'd try using the unattended install from CD to
somewhat automate the process.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314459
 
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