Is there any software that install programs and plugins on several machines?
You’re missing the vital detail of which OS you are using. Or do you want a single solution for multiple OS?
How many machines are you dealing with?
I’d look at imaging the machines as you may run into issues with fonts and certain software not installing, or hanging on a ‘next’ button / requiring restart. You can also roll back easier.
You can create deployments for the autodesk stuff.
+1 for imaging, especially for Windows. The *.wim format has a reasonable compression ratio, so squirting down the image is ok on a gE network.
Configuration Management only truly works well in a Linux environment.
Imaging seemed like the perfect solution right up to the point where every computer on our farm seemed to have different motherboard drivers, network cards etc. Maybe Virtualization is the answer?
By the way, we’ve been experimenting with outdated Infiniband. And by outdated I mean 20Gbps. We’re getting up to about 10gbps in real world usage. Would be great for pushing out system images FAST.
VMs, eh?
We’ve had good luck with imaging on a wide variety of hardware here - just have to be sure you add the necessary drivers as you expand your pool of hardware.
I re-imaged 60+ machines in about three days to get our workstations and render farm in sync.
For intermediate fixes, I’ve also had success with the Pro version of PDQ Deploy.
Simon