This paper will discuss the entire process of acquiring and deploying Hopper from the first vendor market surveys to providing 3.8 million hours of production cycles per day for NERSC users. Installing the latest system at NERSC has been both a logistical and technical adventure. Balancing compute requirements with power, cooling, and space limitations drove the initial choice and configuration of the XE6, and a number of first-of- a-kind features implemented in collaboration with Cray have resulted in a high performance, usable, and reliable system.