SCCM 2012 Deploy Windows 7 SP1 Remote Sites

[oloughran]

Hi Folks,

 

I work for a company that has many remote sites, that at the moment has slow bandwidth but will be getting upgraded in the next 6 - 12 months.

 

At these sites most of the pc's run Windows XP, at the moment to upgrade the pc's with our latest image which is Win7SP1 I created a set of bootable cd's which contains task sequence/image, it still means a visit to the remote site to do the upgrades and is time consuming to say the least.

 

"my question" - has anyone had to deploy an OS to remote sites with slow bandwidth before and done it successfully? Also is there an easier way of doing it other than the way I'm currently doing it?

 

any help or suggestions on this task would be greatly appreciated.

 

thanks in advance.

 

Owen.

[Rocket Man]

By remote sites you mean sites with Distribution points?

If so and you are having trouble distributing the image (not deploying) then you may want to look at prestaged content media as an option for the slow WAN links to get your packages across.

[oloughran]

Thanks for your reply.

 

No the sites don't have dp's, they only have pc's that connect to our domain using business broadband, but the links are slow and are due to get upgraded to a faster link in the next 6 - 12 months.

[Rocket Man]

 

No the sites don't have dp's, they only have pc's that connect to our domain using business broadband, but the links are slow and are due to get upgraded to a faster link in the next 6 - 12 months

 

Is there any server infrastructure at remote sites?

I would consider implementing DPs. Again this depends on finances/resources for server infrastructure.You can throttle DPs for bandwidth usage etc...Some sites I have are connected via 7mbps connections. These sites may only have 50-60 PCs. But imaging works fine considering there are local DPs and any content like ADRs are distributed at non-business hours, thus having no affect on the link at business time. The only other traffic that crosses these links are AD replication and some outlook client users connecting to the exchange and also the SCCM client communication back to a central MP, which again could be throttled down to a much less frequent time than that of the default 60mins in the client settings.

 

A DP can also be a windows7 machine....but with this method I think you have no PXE functionality, but you could deploy OS via staged method(onto the live OS) and atleast then the content associated with the task sequence would be local and no need to run around with discs on the individual machines.