Quick Ghost Purchasing Question

[chucky2]

Just was wondering if you can buy Ghost 7.5 Corp. edition and just buy the mininum 10 licenses and ghost more than 10 machines over the network at the same time. Not fancy stuff like dropping a particular program on, just taking a full image of a master computer and dropping it to say 20 clients.

Or, do you have to buy all the client licenses?

Thanks!

Chuck

 

[bigshooter]

What OS are you deploying with Ghost? You should be able to do it, but you're going to be severely straining whatever machine you're using as your ghost server. I have never been a big fan of using ghost for deployment, plus although you can do it doesn't mean it's legal. You still wouldn't be licensed for that many connections.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

What you're suggesting is not legal, but I suspect it works just fine.

I'm curious as to why bigshooter doesn't like GHOST for deployment, it's actually a very easy and quick solution! I personally don't know of an easier method, especially when you have a large quantity of identical machines.

 

[stash]

No it will not work. When the ghost session starts on the server it will accept 10 clients and thats it.

Edit: as far as straining the machine, thats ridiculous. The load on a machine is almost identical if you are ghosting 2 machines or 200. I typically run the ghost console from my workstation and then have the images on a file server somewhere. But I've run a ghost server (both console and storing the images) on a PIII 500 with 128Mb of RAM and the cpu util never went above 50% while imaging.

 

[yoda291]

You won't strain the machine, but you'll strain the network you're connected to. If it's just the 10 machines, you should be fine. It is my experience that ghost loves to multicast and ends up flooding the network with traffic. Check with whoever manages your switches first. And don't forget to TURN OFF ghost's built in DHCP. You don't want 2 dhcps serving out IPs on the same network.

 

[stash]

Originally posted by: yoda291
You won't strain the machine, but you'll strain the network you're connected to. If it's just the 10 machines, you should be fine. It is my experience that ghost loves to multicast and ends up flooding the network with traffic. Check with whoever manages your switches first. And don't forget to TURN OFF ghost's built in DHCP. You don't want 2 dhcps serving out IPs on the same network.

This is only partially true...yes mutlicasting can put a big time strain on the network. But Ghost 7.5 also has the ability to do unicasts. You can still image many machines (I've done over 100 with this method), but the other users on the network not being imaged will barely notice.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with a built in DHCP server on ghost...there is none. If a ghost client is configured to get its IP from DHCP for imaging, it will get its addressing info from your network's DHCP server. If there is no DHCP server on the network, the ghost client will not connect, unless you specify static settings.

 

[bigshooter]

Originally posted by: gunrunnerjohn
What you're suggesting is not legal, but I suspect it works just fine. I'm curious as to why bigshooter doesn't like GHOST for deployment, it's actually a very easy and quick solution! I personally don't know of an easier method, especially when you have a large quantity of identical machines.

I use Ghost for servers, and for anything that I need a quick and easy image of. For multiple machines though, I still use RIS. The first time I setup a server just for ghosting I didn't RTFM and I put the images on a NTFS partition. Big mistake. Ghost is slower than crap on NTFS. So I figured out that you have to use FAT32. Other than that little mistake I probably just got more comfortable using RIS. The last time I had used Ghost for any major deployemnt was 2-3 years ago when it wasn't even capable of win2k guid removal ,but it worked great for a bunch of new machines that we had to put win95 on (propietary software).