Education: How are you updating your 1:1 OS X devices to Yosemite?

No matter what option you go with, it'll be slow since it's a pretty big upgrade. If you can do a wipe and start fresh it's probably the best. But with those you have to make sure you have a good backup in place for the user data and then a method to restore afterwards.

You could also create a package to update to Yosemite and have them run it from self service. It's quick and reboots into the installer window which on a SSD Air should take about 10-15 minutes. This method doesn't require backing up data, but it's still recommended.

Also, do you currently have FV installed on the machines? Because that brings up some more issues.

Thanks for your response.

I used the article below to update. Usually it's been 10-20 minutes for install. We noticed when more jump (maybe 5-10 more) on to update it definitely takes longer. Do you think it has to do with # of distribution points?

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=173

Are you caching the installer to the computers first and having the self service policy install from the cache?

@mvu I think it depends on the level of skill/comfort the end user has for installing an OS as to whether you want to use Self Service to deploy an OS upgrade or not. If there is enough room to cache a customized installer and enough room for the installer to run then it probably wouldn't take too long and require much user interaction with the installer. But if you don't want them to setup things like iCloud accounts or FileVault you will probably need to do a little work after the install happens to prevent some of that stuff.

A few months back when we had to upgrade around 600 computers to Mac OS 10.9.5 we chose to have the staff members make appointments to bring in the computers and me and another tech did the work ourselves. We scheduled 20 computers per day. We used bootable Maverick installers that were running off external SSD drives over either Firewire or USB. Everyone had done a Time Machine backup to an external USB hard drive before we did the upgrade. We had other updates that had to be done at the same time. It generally took about 3 hours per computer. But these were older computers with traditional hard drives.

We have to come at this from various vectors. For our returning faculty and staff we have simply distributed the .ESD (created using InstaDMG) via self-service and it's brilliant. We don't cache AND we do have the internal bandwidth to support this amongst a large number of users. I see similar timing on SSDs (~20) and ~30+ on HDDs. FYI we don't see the need to cache the installer here since it's an optional upgrade over the summer for faculty (Required at the end of August) I don't see the point in caching something they might not install for two months. Especially since that would have been 10.10.2 or 10.10.3 if I'd done that in May.

That said, any new or repaired unit get's imaged via Pre-Stage that get's totally wiped and loaded afresh. When our students arrive (only about 365 of them) they rotate through an imaging station on the first day of orientation. We image them in groups of about 50 in under 15 min total imaging time. That's with ALL the software they need to get started using a compiled image under pre-stage. The 15 min mark is a high average. SSD bearing units tend to clear out well ahead of that mark.

We collect in summer and reimage so everyone is on same baseline. The compiled config installs pretty quickly on gig ports (15 minutes including lots of software) allowing us to image many batches of computers a day across a few schools.