Revit 2010 Deployment & SCCM

[Anonymous]

Good Day everyone,

I am creating a deployment for Revit MEP, Architecture and Structure 2010 and need to push it out to 16 offices through the US and Canada via SCCM. The deployment is created on the primary SCCM server and then pushed out to the secondary server in each office for local install. The problem is that when someone installs the product, it goes back to the Primary server to pull down the Content data rather than the local copy located on the secondary server. Is there any way to change this behavior to make this product more SCCM/SMS friendly?

Thanks for your help!

Terry

[RevitGarage]

We are having the exact same issue.  However, not everyone has permissions to the primary server location so when they try to install, the content won't download.  Granting permission to everyone isn't an option.  What in the deploy is pointing everyone back to our primary server?

[hashim.mundol]

If you have made sure the following steps (from the Autocad 2010 Documentation, its similar for revit install too) are taken care, it should take the source as distrubution point. Key is not to mention the absolute path per point 10.

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/acad_nag0.pdf

or

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Product_Help/Autodesk_Inventor/Autodesk_Inventor_2011/130InstallInstruc...

7.In the Source Files dialog box, make selections to where SCCM retrieves the files and how it manages them. Click Next.

Note: In this procedure, "Always Obtain Files from a Source Directory" was selected.

8.In the Source Directory dialog box, specify the directory where the source files are stored. Click Next.

9.In the Distribution Points dialog box, select the distribution point(s). This is the location from which the software package will be deployed to the target systems. Click Next.

10.In the Program Identification dialog box, enter the name of your program. This is the name that displays in Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel. In the Command Line field, enter AdminImage\setup.exe /W /Q /I AdminImage\<deployment name>.ini /Lang en-US. In this case, our deployment is named Autodesk Inventor 2011, so you would enter AdminImage\setup.exe /W /Q /I AdminImage\Autodesk Inventor 2011.ini /Lang en-US. Click Next.

Note: The example above assumes the language pack you wish to install is US English. /W is the flag for SMS and SCCM, /Q is the silent install, /I indicates this is a deployment installation.

[Anonymous]

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@hashim.mundol wrote:

If you have made sure the following steps (from the Autocad 2010 Documentation, its similar for revit install too) are taken care, it should take the source as distrubution point. Key is not to mention the absolute path per point 10.

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Hashim,

Unfortunately the deployment is not the same for the Revit suite as it is for AutoCAD 2010, or really most other Autodesk Products.  In addition to the base deployment, there is also the Content Library that gets copied out once the main installation is complete.  This Content Library is copied from the original deployment location ... which is not the same in SCCM.  The package process in SCCM is as followed:

1) You create a package in SCCM as you have listed in your deployment guide, this package points to the folder where you created your deployment (lets call it \\server\share\Revit )

2) You create a program that has your installation paramaters (again, your guide has this part)

3) The package is distributed to the primary server and any secondary servers in the enterprise

** This changes the deployment location from \\server\share\Revit too \\SCCMServer\SMSPKGx$\ABC1234 which is located in different servers (ie: \\SCCMServer2\SKSPKGx$\ABC1234, \\SCCMServer3 .. etc)

For AutoCAD, and even the base Revit product, this is not a problem as it uses the relative installation path that it pulls from SCCM.  When ContentLoader.exe launches, it looks to the original deployment location ( \\server\share\Revit ) to download the content.  This poses as a major challenge in my case as my primary SCCM server (including the workstation VMs where i build my deployments) is in Toronto, and my office which contains a SCCM Secondary Site Server is in Vancouver.

As this issue is over a year old, i've since figured out a workaround to this problem .. though its not very elegant.  Specifically:

1) Create a Mapped drive on the WKS VM where our deployments are built to match our standards directory (W:\)

2) Point the Content installation to that directory to pull its data and let the content install there

3) Replicate the Revit Content folders for each product to each office where Revit is used using DFSr

4) Modify 4 or 5 different .ini files and a couple other files to point to the correct locations to find the Revit content

This method has worked, but has not been perfect.  I know I can't be the only person building deployments for a company with offices across a country or two, so either I'm doing something wrong or the Revit deployment just wasn't designed for this method of deployment.

I've since moved on to Revit 2011, which i'm encountering similar issues.  I'm stepping back to basics just to make sure that everything i'm doing is correct and will let you know how it goes.

[DannyHubbard]

My guess would be that it is the Content.rcl files in the deployments on the secondary servers. These files contain paths to the content which will probably point back to the first server where the deployment was created.

Beyond manually editing the content.rcl files in the deployments copied to the secondary servers, I am not sure how else you would prevent this.

[Anonymous]

Danny,

I believe you are correct.  Content.rcl does sound familiar to me 🙂

My attempt with a default deployment build failed within my SCCM environment.  I'm going to rebuild them again by doing the following steps:

1) Create a mapped drive to W:\, mirroring the folder structure we have on our standards folder (replicated to all offices via DFSr)

2) Create the deployment, pointing the Revit Content to W:\ so that it gets populated (will copy content to the correct drive once the deployments are created)

3) Once the deployment is complete, modify the content.rcl file so that it points to the W:\ drive folder tree

4) Copy the ContentENU and ContentAll folders from AdminImage to W:\

5) Create the Package and Program in SCCM and distribute as normal

SCCM does have the ability to require a drive map for deployment, ie: I could map a drive, point the deployment to that drive, then specify that the deployment requires a drive letter.  The challenge for that however is a lot of our systems have card readers which sometimes grabs drive letters at random and would cause the deployment to fail.

This may be a little presumptuous of me, but would Autodesk consider updating the deployment documentation for Revit products to more accurately reflect the steps required for deploying this product through SCCM?

I'll post the results of my deployment testing later today.