anybody image a "lab" of notebooks?

[arod]

Ive been looking at a few imaging suites for making a single image for a lab of notebooks we use at work. Just wondering what others use and their experinces good/bad.

We lend these laptops out to other groups who do all kinds of things to them and was looking for a good way to make a image to revert them all back to when we get them back but also keep the ability to update the image when needed to do windows updates, software updates etc. And only have to do it once and then just reimage the rest of the computers.

 

[Navid]

The only problem with that is that all the data files stored on the notebook will also be erased by re-imaging it.

Unless, you have the OS on a different partition (or physical drive) than data.

 

[nweaver]

We use Altiris Deployment Server. I'm pretty partial to it, and I think it works pretty good.

 

[arod]

yeah losing data is no problem.... i want to lose the data.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: arod
yeah losing data is no problem.... i want to lose the data.

Then, True Image would be a good choice.
Version 10 has minor incompatibility issues with Vista. A new version is being released soon.

 

[arod]

does it work over lan? i think that would be the easiest way to restore images is boot via a cd/floppy to reimage them.

also the cheaper the better.... dont want to break the bank doing this (as much as possible)

 

[nweaver]

Altiris works with PXE booting, and so you can just tell the machine to reimage, and let the client reboot the laptop, or you just reboot it. It boots and does a PXE boot, downloads the image and reconfigures itself based on old settings. The nice thing about that versus something like Trueimage (based on my limited experience) is that the client will reconfigure the PC, so it will rejoin the domain, or workgroup, rename it to the right name, check for custom IP settings, etc. Then you have one master image, and no work once you start the job, as opposed to smaller solutions that might require you to rename/rejoin networks/restore custom settings for each machine, or create/maintain an image for each unique machine.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: arod
does it work over lan? i think that would be the easiest way to restore images is boot via a cd/floppy to reimage them.

also the cheaper the better.... dont want to break the bank doing this (as much as possible)

I don't know. But, you can download a free functional demo and check it out.

 

[dphantom]

Altiris is very good. Ghost is also excellent for imaging. I have used both.