Deploy Anywhere Driver Tags

[Sacrifice]

Can anyone explain to me "Tags" when it comes to Deploy Anywhere?  I'm also looking for some documentation that might explain it to me.  For instance I'm currently attempting to utilize DA for all of my XP imaging.  I've downloaded all of the CAB files for XP for my models.  I know that I can import them into DA, but should I be tagging them as anything in particular?  How does tagging work?  I see that I can enable tagging of drivers from the "Deploy Image" task within my imaging job and that allows me to specify a list of tags. 

Here is how I think it might work but I'd like your thoughts.  If while importing my CAB files I add a tag of "XP" to each CAB file, then within my Deploy Image task I specify the "XP" tag, will it search through those drivers first, then if it's still missing drivers will it search the rest of the DB or will it only search those tagged drivers.  I'd like some explanation of how this works.  Feel free to point me to any documentaton that you may have on this.

Thanks you in advance for your replies.

[Swapnil_Patil]

Hello Sacrifies,

Thanks for your query on this.

Tagging in DeployAnywhere (DA) is introduced to give a special preference to the drivers which user always wants to re-target. If user used tagging then Deployanywhere directly copies tagged drivers to deployed image and doesn’t look after Driver DB for any additional drivers. DA will always re-target such drivers forcefully and by-pass the current logic which it is currently doing for re-targeting. We have introduced /tags=<comma separated list of tags> switch to take care of this functionality however if your creating Deploy image task through console then you need not to add specifically and user only has to enable option ‘Enable tagging of the drivers’.  In DeployAnywhere operations like evaluation and download of drivers, the tagged driver list works as input.

In your case you can import all required XP drivers to Driver Database and tag them accordingly as you want. No particular tagging is required. Below link will help you to add drivers and tag them accordingly.

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.INFO4341.html

Once driver addition in completed then while creating Deploy Image task you can enable option ‘Enable tagging of the drivers’ available and give list of tags that you want to consider while DeployAnywhere.

As of now we don’t have any public document available specifically on tagging functionality to share with you however below is link for Deploy Image task for your reference.

https://help.symantec.com/cs/itms8.1/DS/v63799097_v119950089/Deploy-Image-task/?locale=EN_US

I hope this will help you and let us know any more details on this.

 

Thanks,

Swapnil.

[Sacrifice]

Thank you for the explanation.  Just so I'm sure that I understand. 

What you're saying is that if I tag a driver during import, and then enable tagging and select that tag within the Deploy Image task it will only copy that driver and will NOT use any drivers from the rest of the Driver DB?

I have a few more questions if this statement is true, but I'll wait for your response.

[Swapnil_Patil]

Hi Sacrifice,

 

DeployAnywhere (DA) first get list of device class based on the devices like storage, network and then find out matching driver available in tagged drivers, Image and in Driver Database.

For each device class DA first consider tagged driver as on priority and in case tagged driver for device class is not present then it will consider driver from Driver DB or from an image.

So if you wanted to target tagged drivers then tag drivers for storage and network (critical driver classes)

 

I hope this will answer your question.

 

Thanks,
Swapnil.