Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Switching from piecemeal machines to leases

I've got a small number of users for the number of servers I manage. Right now, there's around 15 users in the company, and nearly all of them have laptops. We currently run an astonishing array of different models, each bought sometime in the previous four years. Because of this, no two are alike, and support is a nightmare.

I want to switch from the process we have in place now to a lease based plan, where my users are upgraded in "flights", so to speak. The benefits will be tremendous. I'll be able to roll out a standard image instead of wondering who has what version of what software, issues will be much easier to debug, and I can conduct thorough tests before rollout.

My problem is that I've never done leases nor planned rollouts like this. What advice would you give to someone who is just doing this for the first time?

See the related question on serverfault, as well!