Deploy only subset of group

[mikezubi]

Hey there

is it possible to deploy only a sub set of hosts within a group?
Let’s say, I have my classrooms organised in groups. Every classroom is a separate group.
Sometimes I want to deploy only half the hosts and not the complete classroom.
Can I achieve this without having to select and deploy all the hosts manually?

Cheers
Michael

[george1421]

The short answer is no.

But I would have to ask, if you have a classroom of computers, how would you know which computers you wanted to redeploy to? What type of grouping would you use, what criteria would you personally use to pick computer x over computer y?

[Tom Elliott]

This is not a feature that’s been implemented yet, though the premise of it is possible. I, however, feel is “safer” to keep your systems in temp groups to do this.

For your example of “half of this room and the other half remain untouched” create a separate group and put the systems you want to image into it. Perform your imaging task and remove the hosts from that group when done. It is a little tedious (sure), but would achieve what you’re asking for.

[mikezubi]

Our classrooms get redeployed quite often, meaning anything from 1 to 5 days. The classrooms are then not always fully occupied, there’s a span of 2 to 12 students per class. Therefore we don’t always deploy the whole classroom if it isn’t necessary, to save time.
Normally we would deploy, for example, the first 4 or the first 8. All the workstations are numbered according to their MAC address so we always know which workstation is which.

I guess for the moment I can work with the temp group system or just manual selection. However, I can’t imagine that it is a big task to be able to select a group to deploy and then on the “confirmation screen” you can select a subset or something like that.

[Wayne Workman]

I did do this at my last job for one classroom.

We had mixed models in there, some were Lenovo, some Dell. I hate mixed model rooms. But anyways…

I had three groups for that classroom. One for the whole room, one for the Lenovos, one for the Dells.

Before deployment, I would use the classroom group to ensure exactly and only the snapins I wanted were set for the entire room, the right printers, the right AD Credentials.

Then with the two sub-groups I set the image I wanted each model to have.

Then I would deploy the Lenovos and Dells separately using their groups. Both groups would wake, image, boot, join the domain, deploy snapins and printers.

Like magic.