KACE Systems Deployment Appliance Task Engine and Multicast Deployment

Welcome to this demo of the KACE K2000 Systems Deployment Appliance. The K2000 makes it easy to fulfill all your organization's system provisioning needs with capabilities for inventory assessment, OS and image deployment, user state migration, system configuration, application installation, and recovery. Today we'll show the new task engine in version 3.6 of the K2000, and demonstrate the K2000's new multicast deployment, which lets you deploy an image to multiple systems at the same time. We'll begin on the K2000 homepage, where we can see an overview of all the information we'll need for our deployment. We'll start our multicast deployment by clicking the Deployment tab, selecting new boot action, entering the name of our project, and then selecting Deploy Windows 7 Enterprise with Service Pack 1 from our image library. We'll select Multicast as our deployment type, and then choose our target systems. In this case, we'll deploy our image the 30 different systems at the same time. We'll save our deployment and the process begins. Here, we can see the new task engine in action. The K2000 task engine enables you to automate detailed pre and post installation tasks. At the top right of the page, you can see all of the tasks, currently scheduled for this deployment, such as create a single partition, apply image, copy post install files, and update configuration for OS tasks. The task engine also communicates in real time with each system as it's being deployed. So you can see exactly what's happening throughout the process. This two way communication also enables the K2000 to handle complex deployment tasks, such as multiple reboots. Here we see each system checking in with the K2000. Once all 30 systems have checked in, our multicast deployment will start. All of our systems have checked in now and our multicast deployment is under way. We've also opened remote viewing software that lets us see the deployment as it takes place. This process normally takes about 15 minutes to complete, but we've compressed it for the purposes of this demo. You can see the actual laps time at the bottom right corner of the screen. We're about nine minutes into the process, and we can see that the K2000 is wrapping up the deployment of the new OS and is beginning the post deployment tasks. We'll switch back to the task engine where we can see the K2000 is completing its deployments. We can verify this by the green check marks appearing next to each system. And that's it. The process is complete, and it took just over 12 minutes to push a new Windows 7 image to 30 systems using the K2000's multicast deployment capabilities.