SBS 2008 - The long weekend deployment
The long weekend. Favored by many as a time to rebuild and re-architect their home environment. This weekend was of course my own chance to do just that. So what was on the project list;
- Migrate to SBS 2008
- Deploy Windows 2008 WDS on the SBS 2008 box
- Set up OneCare across my client PCs
First up the migration. It is a dramatic improvement from SBS 2003 migrations, what more can I say. Chris Almida and the migration team have done a solid job in bringing this together. I do of course have some suggestions for those of you planning a migration. Check your back up, I know it says it in the doc, but it's always good to reiterate. Read the doc twice before you start. There is a lot of information in this doc, I broke out my own list of items so that I could ensure that each stage was completed correctly (At a high level, it read; backup, test, answer file, build, test, update, migrate, dcpromo) As I check off each stage I would go back check the health of the environment. Not necessary, but I'm a little particular about that sort of stuff.
Then came installing WDS. In NZ one of my focuses was in fact selling deployment solutions to customers. I became very fond of WDS and the .wim format. It is simply one of the (many) unsung heroes of our platform. Windows 2008 does a great job of making this easy to deploy (add roles, Windows Deployment Services) all I did then was upload my boot.wim and install.wim from a Vista disk then set up my client PCs to PXE boot. WDS joins and names the PCs for you. I could have taken this a step further and completed an answer file, but since I'm only deploying to 4-5 machines a bit of manual labor seemed acceptable. I thought about booting into winPE to snap a new WIM to back up the PC OS but figured creating a gold image for home might be going a little far. Quick tip for those of you that are doing this for customers, best practice I found in the field using WDS was to include Office and AV with your gold sysprepped image. Then leave the other apps out, you could then either manually install these, use scripting or AD to deploy the apps later.
Finally setting up OneCare across my environment. I had been using another product which has recent come up for renewal. OneCare does a really cool thing where is can create a 'circle of trust' which essentially means you can set one client to proxy the updates for the others. I like the reporting it has, but have to be honest and say I had to have some therapy with the firewall piece. In the end I was able to solve it by clearing some of the exceptions and trying again.
This week, Terminal Services and that second server premium box.