We have approximately 5,000 microcomputers running Office97 and we are attempting to upgrade them to Office 2000 using the supplied deployment tools. (mst) We have the installation directory on an NT4.0 server. This machine is a fairly competent server, Pentium3 733Mhz, 256MB RAM, and the deployment directory is located on a different hard drive than the operating system. We do not have SMS.
The problem we are having is as follows:
We can achieve excellent installation times on individual computers; we are consistently in the 10-20 minute range. When we attempt to increase the number of clients running the install simultaneously, the required time to complete the install increases almost exponentially on each additional client. 2 clients takes 45 mins, 3 clients takes an hour, and 4-5 takes well over an hour. The server logs and performance monitoring tools,etc. indicate that the server is far from being maxed out on processor, memory, etc. After watching the file use patterns onthe server during testing, it appears that subsequent clients cannot continue until the previous clients have completed their useof the transform file. This seems indicative of a file-locking issue, but since the files are on a read-only share, it seems unlikely that this should be the case. Regardless, we cannot run the installation on more than 5 clients simultaneously.
As we wish to roll out Office2000 at night to our various sites, the indicated install times are totally unacceptable. There would simply not be enough time to roll out Office2000 to our larger sites overnight.
How can we reduce the install time?
