Dividing deployments into smaller groups

[senseiTX]

I need to swap the AV client on a few thousand machines. I have a collection that shows all machines with a specific version of an .exe file that belongs to the old AV client that is no longer present post upgrade. I have other collections that divide that one by departmental OU so I can target different departments on different nights. The head of one of those groups wants his team broken down further, he'd like them done over two different nights. I tried creating a collection that targets machines ending in even or odd IP addresses but there's lots of overlap since some machines show several different values in SMS_R_System.IPAddresses. Using MAC address isn't much better since laptops have at least 2.

 

Has anyone found a way to split collections somewhat randomly that is self maintaining? I'm pretty sure I've seen methods for doing this, I just don't remember where I found them...

[Peter van der Woude]

Are you look for something like this: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCCM-Collection-Splitter-e1c82b06

[Jorgen Nilsson]

Hi,

I like to split them using the last number in the computername, given that the computername has numbers in the end , then you can divide it using the last number,and it is also very easy to commuinicate with the end user when their computer is to be upgraded as almost everyone has a computername tag or something like that.

I have an old blog post on the topic from SCCM 2007, the logic is the same though.

http://ccmexec.com/2010/11/planning-an-upgrade-of-an-application/

 

Regards,
Jörgen

[senseiTX]

Are you look for something like this: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCCM-Collection-Splitter-e1c82b06

 

Thank you Peter, that's an interesting tool. I'll check it out.

 

 

Hi,

I like to split them using the last number in the computername, given that the computername has numbers in the end , then you can divide it using the last number,and it is also very easy to commuinicate with the end user when their computer is to be upgraded as almost everyone has a computername tag or something like that.

I have an old blog post on the topic from SCCM 2007, the logic is the same though.

http://ccmexec.com/2010/11/planning-an-upgrade-of-an-application/

 

Regards,

Jörgen

 

Jörgen your blog post is the one I remembered seeing, I just couldn't find it now that I needed it! Our machine names are based a combination of a few WMI variables so I'm sure I can come up with some way to do something similar. Thanks for you help rediscovering it.