Using Systems Management Server to Deploy Windows 2000

Selecting Computers to Upgrade

An advertisement tells SMS to make available to an SMS collection a specific program within a package. A collection is a very flexible definition of computers, users, or user groups. In the case of a Windows 2000 software distribution, you would initially use collections that are a small number of computers used for testing purposes. Later, you would use collections that are all computers that are ready for Windows 2000. You might subdivide the collection by site or organizational unit.

Collections have the additional benefit of being dynamic; as time goes on, you can add computers to a collection, and the advertisements that are available to that collection automatically become available to those additional computers. If the collection is based on the memory capacity of computers, for example, computers are added to the collection as their hardware is upgraded for Windows 2000. If you install additional memory in a computer, the SMS hardware inventory detects this and records it within SMS. This computer is automatically included in the collection; therefore, the Windows 2000 upgrade is made available to the computer. Other than physically adding the memory to the computer, this is all automatic.

For more information about determining which computers in your organization are ready to upgrade, see "Using Systems Management Server to Analyze Your Network Infrastructure"in this book. This includes defining queries to select the computers from the inventory that SMS maintains. You can use these queries to create collections, as described in the following procedure. SMS also provides a sample report, "Windows 2000 Upgrade Candidates by Site and Roles," which might help with this process.

To create a collection of computers ready for Windows 2000

In the SMS Administrator console, select Collections.
From the Action menu, point to New, and then click Collection.
In the Collection Properties dialog box, enter a name for the collection.
On the Membership Rules tab, click the New Query Rule button.
In the Query Rule Properties box, click the Browse button and select the appropriate query.
For example, use a query that you have made to report on the computers that are available to be upgraded to Windows 2000. (For help developing such a query, see the chapter "Using Systems Management Server to Analyze Your Network Infrastructure"). You might have other queries that you prefer to use, such as All Windows 95 Systems or queries that you have defined to include all computers at specific sites.
Add query rules and direct membership rules as necessary.

Alternatively, at step 4 you might prefer to click the New Direct Rule button and then use the Create Direct Membership Rule wizard to specify the computers that you want to upgrade. This choice might be your best option during testing, especially if you have a small number of arbitrarily chosen computers that you want to run the package on.

An issue to consider is that SMS 2.0 allows collections to include computers, users, or user groups. Including users or user groups in Windows 2000 might not be appropriate, because users can often log on to different computers. Therefore, each computer that a user logs on to could be upgraded, especially if the advertisement is assigned and runs whether or not the user chooses it. However, the computers that they log on to might not be ready for the upgrade, or the users that usually use the computer might not be trained to use Windows 2000.

Caution

For more information about using security to control who can adjust or use the advertisement, see "Distributing Software" in the Systems Management Server Administrator's Guide.