Fighting the past

[Tripredacus]

I'm stuck in a situation that I thought got resolved but it really hasn't. I just haven't heard anything about it in a while. What it comes down to is fighting against the ideas and lessons of the past, and that decisions were made at some point, accepted and never revisited. And say it turns out there is a better way, how hard should someone fight to be heard about them?

Sometime in the past at my company, they used images for computers. Then things started going wrong and it was decided to not use images anymore. I came into this job during this "no images" period, and also from another company (or so say a much larger and successful company) that did use images and they knew how to use them properly. So when I got hired, the software people are still running around with floppy disks and CDs! They do use Ghost but only for temporary purposes. I see this as an opportunity to make everything more efficient. I write software to eliminate the use of the floppy disks (BIOS updates and Ghost, etc) and start making drive images. Everything goes fine until a customer complains.

So it comes back to how we're not supposed to be using images for X reasons. So we stop using images and of course production time increases dramatically. I start to rethink the process and research why we aren't using images. The reasons were HALs and memory timings. I researched many things including Imagex. I could not, however, find ANY issue with using images and memory timings so I threw out that idea. Then my company says "we need to start using Imagex".

So I get the server up and running, building our custom Win PE for the network boot and start making images. Except I am taking into account the HAL issue so that won't crop up again. I am also not just making an image and letting it rot up there, which was probably the reason they had problems before. I keep track of everything and if there is an issue that arises during our hardware eval process, or at any other time, I correct the image and replace the bad one. Image maintenance yes?

So we had a problem with a driver on a new board, but it got out before we caught it. So the guy who does the evals, and the XP unattended fixes the installer so this won't happen. I find out about it, and fix the image for it and everything is going fine again. Then he finds out we are using images (again) and goes to complain about it. So now we can't use images anymore. It doesn't matter if everything is maintained and checked and updated. And all the work that my company had me go through to implement Imagex, its come down to us not wanting to use it now? What did they think Imagex was? It uses images!

So I'm in a situation where we are going backwards again. And I had gotten some systems down to a total deployment time of 10-20 minutes. Now those same systems are up to a 2+ hours to deploy completely. How is it going to look when suddenly I can't handle the work load anymore? I really want to talk to someone about this but I'm up against a guy who's been here for years, and doesn't ever try to work with me on this issue. Its just "this is how it is" and brings no proof or research. It's down to his word against my word + research and proof of my concepts. Its not enough and I'm not sure how to handle the situation.

[Zxian]

I understand your frustrations completely. There are so many times when the people "upstairs" can't make up their minds about how things should be done, and therefore we end up running around going back and forth.

[IcemanND]

What are they going to do (doing) with vista? It's default install is IMAGE based? What's this other guy going to do reverse engineer Microsoft and go back to the XP way of installing?

[Tripredacus]

What are they going to do (doing) with vista? It's default install is IMAGE based? What's this other guy going to do reverse engineer Microsoft and go back to the XP way of installing?

No, for some reason Vista gets a pass. Probably because of the generalize option for Sysprep. I'm kinda looking forward to when XP goes away because then I'm not going to have to deal with this. Its kinda silly tho, to think that Vista is the magic fix. After working with it for so long, I realise it has some of the same problems.

But I hope they don't decide to not use Vista images because it takes even longer than an XP load if doing it by hand.

Fortunately my boss is on my side. He says to just keep a lid on it because he realises it is also silly but he can't really do anything about it either.

[cluberti]

There is one way that can "bridge the gap", and that is to use MDT to stage both your Vista and XP installs. Obviously the XP installs will be images or flat file installs, depending on which way the wind blows in your environment, but it provides one WinPE environment for all images, and allows XP to be fully automated (and can be moved into SCCM if need be if you use it later) thus reducing the potential for screwing up.

It also does a really good job of hardware discovery and driver installs, so that's a plus. And with Vista being image-based, you'd have everything come off the same WDS server or farm, use the same WinPE boot from PXE, USB, CD, whatever, and it'll at least allow for the exact same install every time for a flat-file XP install if that's the way you do it this week.

[Tripredacus]

We are caught in a situation about putting too much extra effort into XP. Its the same reason we didn't adopt SP3 yet. We weren't supposed to be dealing with it anymore, with exception of approved images, because downgrade rights was supposed to end in January. Now its to July. Should I bother playing around with MDT for XP at this point? And after final preparations, testing and piloting would I only get to use it for 2-3 months if not less?

I may look into it for Vista instead. I tried BDD but that never seemed to work properly for me.

[Noise]

The fact is, that up until Vista - no professionally done windows deployment should be done with images. You're not "fighting the past" - you dealing with valuable lessons learned. And it sounds like the policy makers where you work know what they're doing.

Just because you think you know how to do images properly on XP/2003 doesn't mean that is the best way to install those OS's. Speaking from literally 10,000 Windows installations here; scripted deployments are far more stable and have better performance than imaged installations.

[IcemanND]

And that's a load of manure. I've been using images for 10 years and imaged 5000 to 10000 machines a year, the only issues I've ever run into are with applications that tie themselves to the hardware, thank you AutoCad, and trying to make them go across HAL's, which I don't do unless it is specifically supported by Microsoft. I've also done 3000-4000 scripted installs a year over that same time frame it all depended upon the breed of Windows XP/200/95/98/ME whether we owned the machine or someone else did.

But it's really 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. Also depends upon how you handle the rest of your environment.

Let's see the normal arguments:

"But it's stale the moment you capture it." so is your scripted install, once updates are released you have to update your process just like I update mine.

"Mine works across all hardware" Big wup, when was the last time I had to drop an image on a Standard HAL machine.........can't remember. With a 3-4 year swap out schedule here all of our machine fall into the ACPI Uni/Multi category. After that it adding drivers, hmm, you have to do that with new models also. Oh you just drop them into a folder, so do I, ghost images have been editable for awhile now, but I do it when I install the updates.

"Scripted installs are faster" ???????? My image installs 6 minutes from boot to usable machine.

"Imaged machines run slower." never seen a difference, except when someone tries to force a HAL in where it doesn't belong.

I'm sure I missed something.

[cluberti]

Agreed. Images are *fine*, they just aren't officially supported. Not being officially supported does not mean it doesn't work, it just means it's not tested and therefore the risk falls on the user for doing things that way - if it breaks, tough. However, images work, and as Iceman says, the only problems stem from poorly written software or HAL issues, which are dreadfully easy to avoid.

As to the original question re-asked, no, I would not spend the time fighting the XP ship unless you expect to be running XP for more than the next 6 months. If so, I'd say it's worth the 30 days time investment to make it work, but if you are going to Vista entirely in 6 months, it's best to leave it alone and polish your Vista deployment skills in the next 180 days.

[Tripredacus]

I agree with this sentiment. I would much rather work on Vista related projects. Right now, Vista deployment is pretty low, so I have the time to put extra work onto them. The process right now is ridiculous, but it comes down to time. After 6 months (or July) the only XP we will be doing is images supplied by other companies, or for repair and hard drive replacement.