Hi All,
I'm looking for a bit of advice on how best to deploy software updates to an estate.
We are currently running Systems Centre Configuration Manager 2007 R3 and have a mixture of XP and Windows 7 clients across a number of sites with 4 software distribution points configured.
My question is really around patching, given the following scenario.
Our estate has 10,000 laptops, so obviously as with any deployment we send out we will need to define a test group and deploy to them first. Having created the appropriate update list, we would then create our deployment package. This will then be managed under the 'Deployment Management' section where we would define the collection, schedule and config options.
Once a collection is targeted, we've been running the following report "States 1 - Enforcement states for a deployment" to determine the state and progress of the targets compliance statistics.
The next phase would be to deploy to the rest of the estate, but we want to break it down into tranches. What we have done so far is create a hierarchy of collections, so the end collection targets machines with asset ID's starting LAP-1000 and then the next one up would target asset ID's starting LAP-2000 etc. The deployment would then target a collection and it's sub-collections. My question here would be is this how most people would achieve this kind of staggered rollout?
Obviously it could be based on location etc as well but we have gone for asset names. We would normally then just target the deployment at the bottom collection and change it after a few days to hit the next tranche. Any one that were missed would be hit by the fact that we have told the deployment to target sub-collections as well. Does this sound like a good approach?
Secondly, if we want to target the production estate after testing, should we just re-target the job under 'Deployment Management' ? What I've been finding is that you then can't use the "States 1..." report as the number targeted will change to the current collection.
It's worth nothing that the test user collection is not within the hierarchy defined for our production users. Should we perhaps change that and include them at the bottom of the tree? How would others normally achieve what we are trying to do here?
Finally, it looks like you can only target each deployment package to one collection not multiple so am I right to assume that if you want to target different collections (say one for test users, one for DR sites and one for production) you should be creating multiple deployment packages, even if the update list is the same?
I think our basic process works but I'm just wondering if there is an easier way to achieve what we want.
Thanks in advance!
M