Deploy Service Pack – best practices?

[jagablack]

Hi Doug,

I have found some windows boxes in our environment that are missing a service pack, thanks to your Get Info tool that makes it easy to look at a large group.

Now I must ask, what are some best practices to deploy a Windows Service Pack using BatchPatch? Thanks as always,

Jagablack

[doug]

Hi Jeremy – Deploying a service pack is pretty much just as straightforward as deploying anything else. The 2 things that I would pay special attention to are the location of the service pack installer file, and the Concurrent File-Copy Operations Maximum setting in Tools > Settings > General.

1. Regarding the location of the setup/installer file: Place this file on the same computer that BatchPatch is running on. BatchPatch is going to end up copying this file to any host that you are deploying the SP to, so to minimize network bandwidth, keep the file on the BatchPatch machine. If you keep the file on a different machine, BatchPatch will pull it from that computer and push it to target hosts, which will double the data transfer volume.

2. Regarding the Concurrent File-Copy Operations Maximum setting: The purpose of this setting is to throttle the number of simultaneous file-copy operations that BatchPatch performs. If this is not set, then BatchPatch will try to copy the same 500+ MB service pack exe to all remote computers at the same time. This isn’t the greatest idea since it will quickly max out your network connection and each file copy will take a very long time. Keep this setting to a reasonably low number, possibly even just 1. If it’s set to 1 then the file will be copied to each machine sequentially. The number of machines that can execute the deployment simultaneously will not be affected. The only portion of the job that will be affected is the actual file-copy operation.

Running the Windows 7 SP1 installer file with the /? switch reveals the available switches for installation. As with anything that is deployed through BatchPatch (or any script) the installation needs to run silently with no user interaction.

So, in this case we would use /quiet /nodialog (and optional /norestart).

To perform the deployment, highlight the host(s) and go to

Actions > Deployment > Create/modify deployment

Select the location of your SP1 installer file, and then enter the /quiet /nodialog switches in the Parameters field before clicking OK:

Then when you’re ready to execute your deployment, in the main BatchPatch grid, highlight the host(s) and select Actions > Deployment > Execute deployment

A successful service pack deployment will result in Exit Code: 3010, which means that installation was successful but reboot is required. If you didn’t specify the /norestart switch, then Windows will automatically reboot. If you did specify the /norestart switch, then Windows will do nothing until you reboot it yourself.

I hope this helps.

-Doug

[jagablack]

Wow – that is amazing and I am not surprised. Great writeup Doug. I will be using this in the coming weeks.

[jagablack]

Hey Doug, I am executing this now on two machines, and after I kick it off it takes over 10 minutes and I don’t see any update. How can I check on the status of a deployment?

[jagablack]

Ah… ok actually it did eventually come back with a success. I am just going to wait for the reboot. Thanks.

[doug]

Yeah – unfortunately there isn’t anything you can do other than wait for it to complete. In the event that something truly appears to be hung, I would look at the processes running on the target system and see if you still see service pack executable (can’t remember the name of the exe off the top of my head but might just appear as a generic msiexec.exe or trustedinstaller.exe etc) and/or psexecsvc. However, as you know, a service pack installation will take some time to complete, so give it some time.

-Doug

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