Altiris Deployment Solution Time-Savings Validation for Dell Server PDF
Deployment methods
KeyLabs used three deployment techniques and measured the administrative time required for each technique. Manual server deployment. Administrators cycle through CDs, software installation screens, BIOS configuration screens, and so forth as needed to install and configure each server.
No efficiencies are gained as additional servers are deployed—that is, each server deployed requires fundamentally the same amount of administrative time because administrators must go through the same installationsteps as the previous server builds, even if previous servers are the same model of server. Deployment using the Dell OpenManage Server Assistant CD.The DSA CD is a bootable CD that ships with every Dell PowerEdge server and helps automate OS deployment by automatically scripting the OS installation to include Dell-specific drivers. This CD does not provide setup assistance for the BIOS, DRAC, and base-board management controller (BMC) components, nor does it help
with post-OS tasks such as applying hardware updates or installing applications. This approach helps reduce OS installation times somewhat, but administrators must repeat the same tasks for each server deployed.
Deployment using Altiris Deployment Solution. This method is designed to automate server builds. Using Altiris Deployment Solution requires an initial time investment to install the Altiris environment and to create and test server build jobs. After that process is completed, however, Altiris Deployment Solution enables hands-free, remote provisioning of one or more servers—including
hardware, OS, and application configuration.
Special testing considerations for Altiris Deployment Solution Altiris Deployment Solution requires a specific infrastructure: a dedicated Altiris server and a back-end Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database. To facilitate hands-free functionality, many advanced deployment features such as pre-provisioning (the ability to assign a server build to a Dell Service Tag for a server that has not yet been physically added to the LAN) and rip-and-replace (the ability to dynamically provision blade servers based on their location in a chassis) require the use of an Altiris Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) server.
The installation and configuration of Altiris Deployment Solution—including the PXE server configuration—took KeyLabs approximately 45 minutes. In addition to this installation time, KeyLabs built two jobs, one for Server Build 1 and one for Server Build 2, as defined earlier in this article. Unlike the manual and DSA CD installation methods, Altiris Deployment Solution required an initial investment of approximately six to seven hours before the two server builds in the study could be deployed. Figure 1 conveys the breakdown for this time requirement.
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