At University of Bath we use SCCM 2007 (soon to be 2012) to do our
software and OS deployment. With some particularly thorny exceptions.
We do all our PACs (Public Access PCs) with a FAT image as deploying
large apps has proven to be a nightmare for all the reasons you list:
- Bandwidth - with or without multicasting
- Cache space - fiddled with cache clearing and increasing cache space
(now 20Gb reserved).
- Time-outs and failures - managing 15 large app deployments to a
thousand PCs!!!!
Our FAT image this year (deployed September 2014) was 46Gb fully patched
with MATLAB 2013 (as they dont get their act together early enough with
2014B for academic institutions), SPSS, Minitab, Visual Studio, Office,
Visio, Project, CorelDraw, Maple, NVivo, Chemdraw, EViews, Stata and
lots of smaller bits.
Whilst the image size can cause problems, these can be managed and gives
you a success or failure for all apps at once and without loading the
local cache.
Disk space is only a problem during the install phase and until temp
files are tidied up. This image expands to approx 110Gb after install,
we say 200Gb HDD min.
To force apps through that don't play nicely with IIS you can spend
hours messing with the filters or just zip up the app thats got dodgy
components (unzip as part of the install script). We identify these
problem apps during package testing. Large apps get zipped anyway to
improve space and through-put resources.
The only thing that has failed to work with a FAT image is anti-virus
(we install this during the OS deployment towards the end of the task
sequence).
Have not had any apps that break sysprep except anti-virus.
Hope some parts of this are useful.
Phil Heath
Systems Developer
University of Bath
Computing Services
|