A little background first...
The company I work for has its annual users conference at the San Diego Convention Center, much like MMS this year. We actually take up all three floors, yes there are three, most people miss the second floor and that is by design because that is where the SDCC staff have most of their offices. We also take up the meeting and conference rooms at the Marina Marriott, the Omni across the street, the Hyatt down in Sea Port Village, and a couple other hotels nearby. Last year there was over 13,000 attendees and the setup is much like the MMS, sessions up on the third floor, Ballroom 20 is reserved for larger events like our messaging center (150 PC's), the showcase, or demo floor, is on the first floor in halls C and D, and our stage is in hall F and G, A and B are reserved for larger meetings and E is where the employee areas are. Getting to one of my points, we setup 600 + computers for this weeklong event. We actually do all the setup internally, the IT department does it all, we get some equipment from different sponsors, we purchase some, and rent the balance. In the past we have used Norton Ghost to image the computers, and last year we used RIS, this year we are considering SMS OSD/ZTI. But we needed to know how well SMS OSD would hold up when we fired off a few tables full of PC's all requesting an image, would it slow to a crawl like Ghost has done in the past? Would it kill the network connection, how long would it take, would it fail during the process? We had a number of questions we had to have answered before we decided on what to use and we were getting close to starting our setup.
The setup…
Our test image consists of the normal corporate image, OS, SP, patches, AV software, Acrobat Reader, Office 2003 and SP2, so on, but because we are demoing our own software and because most of the people at the "islands" in the showcase area are developers interacting with our customers, we also added our suite of software ArcGIS 9.x Server and Desktop with all extensions, and dev tools, specifically Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, with SQL Express (service set to manual), and MSDN, the total image is a whopping 16 GB on the drive.
BTW on the site server it was compressed to a 6 GB image.
We had 20 Dell Dimension 9150's brought up from our warehouse to our building in order to do a stress test on the server and process. The server running SMS - OSD is a Dell PowerEdge 2850, Dual 2.8, 2 GB RAM, 1+ TB of Hard Drive Space, and a dual 1Gb NIC.
Bill Phillips, a co-worker and the one responsible for 99% of the work regarding OSD on our TCO project, created our CD's to use OSD, we have plans to use ZTI, but OSD works for our test. We prepared to do our test right after 5 PM to see how long it would take to lay down a 16 GB image on to all the PC's at the same time.
The test…
During our preliminary testing it took about 40 minutes for a single Dell to complete the process. We got all the machines ready to start and at 5:17 we kicked of the test, we monitored the CPU, Network usage, hard drive requests, and memory on the server. It started out using about 75-90% of the NIC's 1 Gb connection, the PC's are locked down to only 100 Mb at the switch. After about 15 minutes the server's NIC calmed down and leveled off at about 65% usage. The first machines finished about 5:58, that means it was done and sitting at the logon screen for XP. Some of the other machines took a few minutes more, but we were actually done in under 60 minutes. Impressive. I have seen this takes several hours using Ghost, I am sure that they have made improvements and the server and network core are probably more capable than when we used Ghost, but when you factor in the ZTI part of being able to assign a machine its name, send any additional packages to the machine by adding it to the row in the database, it means that it makes for a uniform setup, and less need for human interaction, it seems like a great solution.