Ghosting - How many images should I keep? 4

[chiprock]

Our company has roughly 500 desktops/laptops. We are a dell shop and on the desktop end we use everything from Dell Optiplex GX260 - D745. On the laptop side we have Latitude C840s - D820. We also have a host other other computers with the older ones being 5 - 6 years old. For the sake of this thread they all are running XP. We currently use 2, yes count them 2, ghost images for reimaging of the system. This covers 80 - 90% of our computers, then the other 10 - 20% we do a variety of other things when we rebuild them.. I recently was discussing with one of our other IS people that it may be bad to have so much dissimilar hardware yet so few images. We have all the way from the latest processors to some PIII etc...

So we believe there may be problems that we are not finding or users are not complaining about becuase of this. The thought being is this image has so many different drivers and other software changes that it does not work well for any image? The other thought is that an image is something that is developed over time and gets better as it is changed (like wine) I am interested to see what organizations are doing. How many images does your company keep? One for each type of computer or hardware set? What are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance for the help,

 

[NoCalAdmin]

I am runnig aobut the same amount of machines, we have at least a dozen different hardware and software specs for diffrect sections of the company and we have at least 15 images to accomodate the different needs.

It is normal to have an image for each different set up.

 

[cdogg]

Where I work, we are primarily an HP desktop/laptop shop and have just a handful of SMS images that are updated every couple months. We support roughly 8,000 workstations.

Two of the older SMS images (no longer updated) are still around to cover older hardware dating back more than 5 years. One is for desktops and the other for laptops. Then we have three newer images for all the rest that have been deployed more recently (again, one for desktops and two for laptops).

Each image is capable of spanning several models. In fact, the oldest desktop image we've held onto will work on as many as 12 different models and probably more that haven't been verified! XP is versatile enough that when booting for the first time after the image is loaded, the OS will detect the correct HAL.DLL and other minor driver changes from the original image. It works quite well actually.

So I guess what you "should" do depends on the similarities across models from the vendor you purchase from, and also based on the imaging software used. The goal is to keep enough images to cover every type of workstation you support, but at the same time keep it to the absolute minimum. When you need to update the image, you don't want to get stuck updating a large amount.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[LawnBoy]

We keep an image of each hardware platform.

 

[chiprock]

Lawnboy,

Could you elaborate on what is mean by 'each platform'? Do you mean OS or each hardware platform. And if OS do you segment by processor, mass controller architecture, HAL? Thanks in advance for your response.

Chip

 

[kmcferrin]

It is unnecessary to keep separate images for each hardware platform. As long as you slipstream the required drivers for all of the hardware platforms that you want to support into the image and use sysprep (to have the machine automatically run a mini-setup after the image is deployed) then you can have a single image that supports all of the different hardware platforms. In this case you would only need to update the image when a new platform is added, and only then to add any new device drivers necessary. Usually you can do this with something like Ghost Explorer instead of rebuilding the image from scratch.

 

[LawnBoy]

We're a Dell shop so we keep an image of each model. Since all our GX-260's run W2K, one image is enough to reload any GX-260. The GX-280's all run XP, etc. etc.

We do this to avoid unnecessary complications with slipstreaming and sysprep. The intern can handle it correctly every time. You could do as kmcferrin suggests, but I find it overkill when we only have 1/2 dozen images.

KISS and all that, y'know?