Lengthy Deployments

[joeman1881]

I am curious what your typical deployment times are for machines in your environment? We are currently using an individual server 2012 r2 box with plenty of resources, and network connection. We have 1gb connection all the way to the machines we are deploying to so I'm pretty sure that isn't the culprit.

 

Our typical task sequence at minimum Includes:

1. Formatting, Applying OS
2. Adding Device to domain
3. Applying Driver package
4. Setup Config manager client
5. Configure Network settings (Batch File)
6. Add Local admins (Powershell)
7. Enable Remote access (Batch File)
8. Add machine to wireless group in AD (Powershell)
9. Install Applications (including office, adobe, java, etc., office being the biggest)
10. Install Updates
11. Restart machine

Maybe I am following the wrong process by not deploying this T.S. and capturing an image for mass deployment, but this method has proven best for our environment because we support a large collection of different types of machines.

 

Our deployment times following this guideline are:

-Microsoft Surface Pro 2 - 2 hrs

-Asus T100 tablet - 3.5 hrs

-Most desktops/probook laptops - 45 minutes to 1hr (roughly)

 

Our biggest obstacle is the more inexpensive devices like the Asus tablets and even the surface pro 2's. Whether we use 3.0 or 2.0 dongles the deployment time is roughly the same. Is anyone else running into issues like this? Are you able to provide me with an idea of your deployment times for similar devices?

 

Thanks,

-Joe

 

[Peter van der Woude]

Yeah, I'm seeing similar behavior with customers, which is usually "easy" to explain. Especially the inexpensive low-end devices have very-very-very slow "disks" (if you can even call it a disk), which usually cause the extreme slow write actions. Sometimes a newer-better driver might help a little tiny bit, but in general you just get what you paid for...

 

Based on the deployment time of the desktops and laptops I would assume that there is little to nothing to be tuned about your task sequence.

[joeman1881]

Yeah, I'm seeing similar behavior with customers, which is usually "easy" to explain. Especially the inexpensive low-end devices have very-very-very slow "disks" (if you can even call it a disk), which usually cause the extreme slow write actions. Sometimes a newer-better driver might help a little tiny bit, but in general you just get what you paid for...

 

Based on the deployment time of the desktops and laptops I would assume that there is little to nothing to be tuned about your task sequence.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I am going to Patch in CU4 (http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3026739) this afternoon to see if any issues are corrected. It looks like my version number is still on 5.00.7958.1000 which appears to be the R2 first release. From the things I am seeing online (please correct me if I'm wrong) I believe I will have to adjust my TS line for config manager install to include a "PATCH" command pointing back to the location of the CU's extracted files on the server? Or is this something that gets updates when the CU4 patch has been applied on the server?

 

Thanks again!

[joeman1881]

I implemented the patch last week. It seem's deployment times are slightly better, but it hasn't been significant enough to say my issue is resolved. Unfortunately the machines that fit into this category need to be on the more inexpensive side of the spectrum so without creating custom images I'm hoping I can find some ways to increase efficiency.

[Peter van der Woude]

 

Thanks for the feedback. I am going to Patch in CU4 (http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3026739) this afternoon to see if any issues are corrected. It looks like my version number is still on 5.00.7958.1000 which appears to be the R2 first release. From the things I am seeing online (please correct me if I'm wrong) I believe I will have to adjust my TS line for config manager install to include a "PATCH" command pointing back to the location of the CU's extracted files on the server? Or is this something that gets updates when the CU4 patch has been applied on the server?

 

Thanks again!

 

You're correct. You've can use the PATCH parameter to update the client during the task sequence.