topic Re: Coaches Corner: Rolling out SAS client to Users in Administration and Deployment

Coaches Corner: Rolling out SAS client to Users

vorkady — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 20:14:24 GMT

Hi,

Is there any recommended practice to roll out SAS client install to users PC /Laptop. Manually installing SAS clients on users PC is a time consuming slow process.

Appreciate if you could provide any prevailing best practices or approaches .

Thanks

Re: Coaches Corner: Rolling out SAS client to Users

LinusH — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 08:16:19 GMT

You should talk to the central pc admin group at your organisation, if such exists. They might have a deployment sw/process.
A common solution is to use Citrix/Terminal Server so you only need to install in one place.

Re: Coaches Corner: Rolling out SAS client to Users

JuanS_OCS — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 11:41:08 GMT

Hello @vorkady,

I can subscribe to what @LinusH indicated. The best practice would be the one applied in your company, and the SAS clients installation would need to fit in it.

One version, very generalized, is virtualization of the clients: Citrix, App-V, ThinApp... This means only one installation, and quick deployment in any desktop with enough resources (CPU, RAM, etc). Virtualization has some challenges, but also many advantages.

Another option, is to deploy the software across the network, using SCCM, with different PROs and CONs.

Normally, the virtualization has the best advantage of reduced maintenance. With SCCM, it is still a local installation, therefore, it could lead to deviate from standards, easily.

Re: Coaches Corner: Rolling out SAS client to Users

vorkady — Sun, 11 Jun 2017 11:07:21 GMT

Thanks .Appreciate your recommendation.I would like to know more about deployment on citrix client install. It would be helpful if you could help by providing additional details such as CPU /RAM required on citrix client to support 1000+ users , we mainly use EG and EM.

Further is there any limitation on number of concurrent users to login citrix clients.

Thanks in Advance

Re: Coaches Corner: Rolling out SAS client to Users

JuanS_OCS — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 07:40:42 GMT

A pleasure.

The general recommendation for any kind of SAS clients (here virtualization or not is not really relevant) is 2 cpus and 2 GB RAM (only for SAS) per concurrent user.

My personal recommendation to you would be to size the Citrix server with some additional slack: 4 cpus + 4 GB RAM per concurrent user for the coming 2/3 years, therefore you would need to ask your stakeholders for some estimations on the growth on the total and/or concurrent users.

Additionally, SAS and the general IT community generally recommends to reserve 1.5 times the amount of total RAM memory for the pagination file, and on a separated physical drive, for the virtualized memory.

If you will go for the Citrix option, please bear in mind that you would need to open the required ports in your firewalls (Citrix server, F5, etc) between the Citrix server and your SAS servers.

Hope it helps.

Re: Coaches Corner: Rolling out SAS client to Users

Mark_sas — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 19:09:24 GMT

Just wanted to add a couple of additional comments to this thread. If you're deploying EG and AMO, you can take advantage of the msi installers which are included in your SAS Software Depot for these clients. MSI files work well with provisioning software.

Regular SAS Deployment Wizard installs can be automated/provisioned using its capture/playback capabilities (see the Record and Playback section in the SAS Deployment Wizard User's Guide).

This is in addition to the aforementioned approaches using terminal virtualization software.