Software Depot best practices

[goitzy]

I am looking for some advice on best practices for deploying software.

Do you use one software depot and all environments point to that depot or do you download one per environment?

For most deployments of other software packages its all in one executable but with SAS the depot is 75 gigs which is alot more files.

What options do people use?

[Mark_sas]

The advantage of using a single depot for all your orders is that they share content.  In this way, you might have two 25 GB orders that merge together into a single 30GB depot.  Note that you can't merge orders from different major SAS versions, for example, you can't have a 9.3 and a 9.4 order in the same depot.  However, you can have all your 9.4 orders, including different maintenance levels stored in the same depot.

For more info on depots, check out the What is the SAS Software Depot section of the SAS 9.4 Guide to Software Updates.

[jakarman]

Using a software depot for all needed instances can be a viiolation with the requirements on desktop and server policies.

It is quite common to have closed desktops distributed locations etc.  In those situations getting a SAS roll-out aligned is a big challenge.

I commonly comes to repackaging the SAS software and forgetting the SAS softwaredepot approach.
In those cases a combined softwaredepot can help al the burdening actions for the one doing the install. 

[SASKiwi]

It is quite OK to file copy SAS Software depots for your own requirements such as running in different environments or locations.

Is your focus mainly on server deployments or client deployments? Server deployments are almost always manual installs and are fairly easy to manage. Client installs can be tricky especially if automated packaging and deployment is required. It is advisable to create a cut-down depot specifically for client installs to reduce the size. SAS deployment manager can do this for you. 

[goitzy]

Right now the depot is for both Server and clinet installs since our client base is so small right now being that we are in development. There could be a licensing issue but after the install you can change the license file to accomodate this. I like the idea of a single software depot for ease of managment and singe source when it comes to dev, testing and migration into prod. I havent heard any reason to not have it this way so far but i thought i would poll people who have more experience than myself.

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

With a small number of users, having a single SAS Software depot is entirely appropriate if all installs are manual. Once automated client installs are required then a second depot just for client software is often advisable.

[goitzy]

Thank you!  ....  thats the appraoch i think will work best in the long run.