Are there any alternatives to Ghost left?

[JackBurton]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: Turkey22

Originally posted by: Smilin
Question for everyone out there:

What is it RIS doesn't do that you want? (multicasting instead of simultaneous unicast for example)

I get this feeling a lot of people don't know what it is capable of and are avoiding it for some reason that doesn't exist.

Ease of setup, knowing the product better, time taken to image and set up. There are some situations where RIS might be interesting, but for me ghost takes 6 minutes to image a machine and it takes me 15 or less to rename and add to the domain re-enter the office cd key, redo printers etc. So around 20 min to go from down to up. I'm already familiar with ghost after using it for the past 5 years. Also creating the image is easy, setting it up and then creating it takes almost no time at all either. I've taken MS classes and have seen what you need to do for RIS. I was willing to go that route and work with it, but in the end we figured it would take less time to use ghost.

Yes on a very small scale I can definately see where imaging would be better. If you have to execute those extra steps you mentions it would definately fall under small scale.

I knocked out 40 machines in a remote site in a day and a half by myself. If I wasn't running around doing other things, and all the equipment was available to me when I needed it, I could have completed the job in 4 hrs.

I think the reason you are equating imaging with "small scale" is because you only know how to use it on a small scale. The scale I'm working with is MONSTEROUS. As a matter of fact, there are very few "scales" that are larger. RIS by itself wouldn't cut it. Like I said, way too time consuming and not as flexible.

 

[drag]

Bah. Use FAI with Cfengine and maybe apt-proxy and never look back. Get stuff running in minutes with no interaction.

 

[KeithP]

Might want to take a look at Drive Snapshot.

-KeithP

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: JackBurton
I think the reason you are equating imaging with "small scale" is because you only know how to use it on a small scale. The scale I'm working with is MONSTEROUS. As a matter of fact, there are very few "scales" that are larger. RIS by itself wouldn't cut it. Like I said, way too time consuming and not as flexible.

I say small scale because large scale = too many for an IT guy to touch.

We have a bit of a unique environment here. ~20,000 users with 1-5 PCs per user that get reloaded many times a year (sometimes many times a month). The IT dept here does not actually load your machine for you. If you want a new install, you just hit F12 at boot and pull one down. Any additional apps not included in one of the many standard images are simply published in AD.

I guess I brought this up because I see lots of people out there spending a lot of money on imaging solutions (when they already own RIS) and are absolutely scared to death of RIS for some reason. You seem to know it pretty well, was it hard to learn?

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Use RIS !!!!!

It comes free with your Windows servers and is REALLY not that hard to learn. Seriously it's easy. There is even a 1-stop howto KB on it.

It is also superior to imaging software in many regards. Here at MS people are always loading and reloading PCs (another new Vista build? ). All it takes is to sit down, boot a machine, hit F12 then pick the OS (and apps) you want. Tada!


For a small handful of machines (talking home or workgroup here) imaging software is great. For a corporate environment of just about any size RIS is the way to go.

agreed, thats what I would look into before buying a third party solution

<- 20-30 server enviroment and 100-120 workstations... though I dont use RIS because its not my task, the other admin here just likes to use raw windows xp sp2 install disk

 

[JackBurton]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: JackBurton
I think the reason you are equating imaging with "small scale" is because you only know how to use it on a small scale. The scale I'm working with is MONSTEROUS. As a matter of fact, there are very few "scales" that are larger. RIS by itself wouldn't cut it. Like I said, way too time consuming and not as flexible.

I say small scale because large scale = too many for an IT guy to touch.

We have a bit of a unique environment here. ~20,000 users with 1-5 PCs per user that get reloaded many times a year (sometimes many times a month). The IT dept here does not actually load your machine for you. If you want a new install, you just hit F12 at boot and pull one down. Any additional apps not included in one of the many standard images are simply published in AD.

I guess I brought this up because I see lots of people out there spending a lot of money on imaging solutions (when they already own RIS) and are absolutely scared to death of RIS for some reason. You seem to know it pretty well, was it hard to learn?

That sounds great, but it will take a looong time for that raw RIPrep install to complete. We have pretty much the same set up here, but it only takes 5-7min to pull down an image through RIS/Ghost. And the machine is fully built and ready to use in 45min. I'm talking the most common apps installed, Windows XP fully patched and configured to the exact specified detail. And like your environment, any other apps are published through AD.

I think RIS is very easy and straight forward. I really don't know why it would scare anyone. And the only negative side to RIS is that it takes too long to complete, and much harder to customize an install. BUT, with Vista, RIS sounds like the way to go. MS's 2007 Server (I'm not sure if that will be its official name) will let you create an image (MS image similar to a Ghost image) and let RIS deploy it. Once MS does that, we're going full out RIS.