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Deployment4 Beta 3 Observations
By Adam Bell | September 28, 2007
For the last few days, I’ve been looking into the next revision of BDD 2007 – Deployment4.
The first thing that I like about this is that it will now officially support server deployments, as well as desktops. This gives you a good robust, free deployment mechanism for your environment if you don’t want to go heavy duty and get into SCCM (essentials etc).
I have a few scripts, which I use with BDD 2007, to perform things like configuring static IP addresses, and dealing with the XP/2003 Uber bug. Now I haven’t checked the Uber bug is resolved, but you can now configure static IP through the Workbench.
Now I will caveat my observations to say that I’m still pretty new to BDD/Dep4 and the stuff that I’ve seen could just be a PICNIC error ;)
1) There appears to be no keyboard navigation through configuring the details of your Computer/Role/Make and Model/Location object.
On the details tab, which contains your “unattend.txt”-esque configuration options, there doesn’t appear to be anyway of actually navigating your way down the page. It’s a case of mouse in one hand keyboard with the other as you set Display Resolution etc.
2) No multiple assignment ability for driver groups.
When I point the “Out-Of-Box” drivers wizard at the Dell PowerEdge driver CD, it imports about 50 drivers. Great. Now I want to assign them to, say, “Dell PowerEdge Servers” driver group. As fas as I can see this has to be done one driver at a time!
3) Static IP assisgnment, one server per Task Sequence. Really?
I added a new task to a “standard server task sequence” object that I created (formerly known as “builds”). Here you have the ability to add configuration objects, for what appears to be per-NIC. You can give it a name, and then the usual IP data (DHCP, DNS/WINS/Static data). What strikes me as odd is that this appears to be the IP address data for this Task Sequence. That makes the TS only useful to one server. I would have thought that this should be configured under a lower node, more specific to the Computer/Location etc?
4) A new deployment doesn’t appear to be able to use “SkipWizard=YES”. In a quirk (which I suspect I might have read in the release notes to be fair) results in the information given when creating a new Task Sequence (Product Key, Local Admin Password etc) not being retained when you deploy a machine. If you then try and deploy a new machine and have selected to Skip the Wizard in PE, everything just kinda stops after wpeinit.
It works if you step through the wizard (Next, Next Next *yawn*), and you’ve also populated the missing data (Product Code, Local Admin Password) under the details tab, but still, why?
Now, as I said before this could be just me (really, please someone tell me I missed something here), but if it’s not then this seems pretty strange stuff to be experiencing in a Beta 3 release IMHO. Well point 4) is, the rest of course, could just be “By Design”.
Don’t get me wrong I actually really like BDD/Dep 4. The ease of getting a build up and running to deployed is excellent. And I love the way I can throw almost anything at it to get the job done – .Reg, VBS, MSI, EXE, PS1 it will do anything you need it to do – so far ;)
I’ve submitted the above as “feedback” on Connect so I guess we’ll wait and see. I’m hoping some bright tech out there will post in the comments that I’m a muppet and it works fine if you do …. ;)
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