Image deployment..

I work for a school district and we've been using norton ghost for a long time.

Are there any other options to backup/deploy images of computers across a wide network.

We have around 28 schools here and some of them are around 10 - 15 miles away.

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Pash

Altiris. It is a very good product overall for image creation/deployment and application package creation/deployment.

Hyper-Me

I also work for a school district, and we are going with Windows Deployment Services.

Unless you have one hell of a connection between sites i wouldnt be trying any product over the WAN.

Our furthest schools apart are about 45 miles one way. But we have servers in each building.

Tin_Man

I've worked in a school district before and we used Ghost. I absolutely loved it.

Going across a WAN would be Sooooo SLOW… Are you trying to image all 28 schools from one location? Does each school have its own server? How big is the images themselves?

Can you travel to the schools? If the school does not have a server or the server doesn’t have the space to hold the images. You can always copy the image to a PC or Laptop and do a multicast session for that school. Depending on the size of images you can do a classroom fairly quickly. I've done a class of 30pcs with a 10gig image in under 3hrs and that was during the school year.

Hyper-Me

Tin_Man wrote: »

I've done a class of 30pcs with a 10gig image in under 3hrs and that was during the school year.

Thats quickly?

Ive done 60 Dell 755's with Vista Business (~8GB image) in 12-14 mins with a WDS multicast.

Tin_Man

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Thats quickly?

Ive done 60 Dell 755's with Vista Business (~8GB image) in 12-14 mins with a WDS multicast.

In a school full of 800kids 350pc's. During the school year that is quick.. lol.

These were old IBM pc's, you know the ones you couldn't give away. P3 (933Mhz) 256ram with the old 10Mbs Nic's. Putting XP SP2 on them

We didn't have the fancy new tech back then. (This was 4yrs ago) lol.

Hyper-Me

Tin_Man wrote: »

In a school full of 800kids 350pc's. During the school year that is quick.. lol.

These were old IBM pc's, you know the ones you couldn't give away. P3 (933Mhz) 256ram with the old 10Mbs Nic's. Putting XP SP2 on them

We didn't have the fancy new tech back then. (This was 4yrs ago) lol.

Oh ok. This particular building was 550 machines and about 2000 students and we reimaged the entire building in the course of 2 work days. (though less time was spent imaging than just foot work)

2.6ghz Core 2's, 4 GB ram, gigabit nic in every box. I love that site.

JBrown

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Thats quickly?

Ive done 60 Dell 755's with Vista Business (~8GB image) in 12-14 mins with a WDS multicast.

Do you sysprep the images and then use WDS to deliver them to the workstations ? Could you elaborate on that, I would like to move to WDS but so far it proves to be a complicated issue.

Hyper-Me

JBrown wrote: »

Do you sysprep the images and then use WDS to deliver them to the workstations ? Could you elaborate on that, I would like to move to WDS but so far it proves to be a complicated issue.

Yes, Microsoft does not officially support a windows image that was not prepared using Sysprep.

Whats to elaborate on? You prepare you base image, run sysprep. PXE boot into WDS, choose the capture image, capture the image. Apply your unattend file to WDS (if you need one), and then PXE boot the rest of the machines and use the Installer boot image to deploy it.

Starke

You should definitely consider Microsoft Deploymet Toolkit with WDS. It's free and us very customizable. If you want to multicast make sure WDS is on 2008.

Silentsoul

jamie.english wrote: »

I work for a school district and we've been using norton ghost for a long time.

Are there any other options to backup/deploy images of computers across a wide network.

We have around 28 schools here and some of them are around 10 - 15 miles away.

I recommend FOG
http://www.fogproject.org/

I work for a schools district and that project is headed by two guys that work for one as well.
Its awesome, if you use the fog service there are so many things you can do, that and you can re size partitions so they are smaller for storage and for pushing out. Its a great project and an amazing tool. Its open source too and does not need a very heavy machine to get it working.

Take a look at it, you wont be disappointed.