Image or Ghost

Kasor

I'm running into a little problem with the N Ghost product... My supervisor is looking for assetment on Image and Ghost..

Ghost can be great and very easy to do it, but we are talking about a scenario with a lot of WKS.. not just a office, but a division within a company.

flares2

Kasor,
Ghost is a very valuable tool and can be easily used even with a vast number of machines. The only downside is the number of images you have to create and maintain. Currently our Ghost Server is in support of approx 3000 machines on our network. We have almost 200 different images that were made to satisfy different types of machines, different sections and different classifications.
If your network is constantly updating (like ours) instead of creating new images every week, you can set up group policies to take care of the updates. Image a machine, place it in its respective OU in ADUC then do a gpupdate /force to pull all the updates that are newer than the image.
Hopefully this helps and your supervisor will see the value in Ghost. We image between 20 and 30 machines daily. If we had to build these by hand, we'd never finish.

sthomas

Kasor wrote:

I'm running into a little problem with the N Ghost product... My supervisor is looking for assetment on Image and Ghost..

Ghost can be great and very easy to do it, but we are talking about a scenario with a lot of WKS.. not just a office, but a division within a company.

I use both Norton Ghost and RIS. I think Ghost works well but when I have to image a lot of PCs with Windows XP Pro I prefer RIS. Sure it has its quarks but works good in my opinion. If you are imaging a large amount of PCs with Vista you might want to check out WDS.

renilcerym

Checkout altiris. It is the software we use here. We have about 2000 computers in our buildings and I can image as many as I want. I have imaged up to 200 computers in a single day before. You can also make packages and scripts to send to the computers that can install anything from specific printers to updates and more. You can group computers in a folder and boot them up, shut them down, Remote into them, or restart them. All you need to do is setup altiris on a server and set your LAN up for PXE boot and have altiris client installed on the computers.

shednik

Check out Shadow Protect...

http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectIT/

Great imaging tool my company just picked up...we currently have a ghost server as well but will be phazing it out for this...

Anything XP/2003 or newer can be imaged live as well as hardware independent restore which is very useful...