Ghosting Servers 1

[CoreyWilson]

Hello all,

I dont know if this thread really fits this forum but I didnt see another that would be better suited.

I am looking for a program I can use to ghost my servers for deployment. In the past I was using Powerquests Deploy Centre but have since lost access to this. What was nice about this program is it could be run across a network from a share in dos (having booted using a network bootdisk) and would allow the repartioning and reconition of NTFS partitions.

Will Symantec's latest edition of ghost enterprise or whatever allow this? I am looking for a solution for deployment of sysprep'ed window server images having booted from a network bootdisk to new identitcal hardware.

Thanks for your assistance.

 

[bcastner]

Symantec purchased Powerquest. The reincarnation of the Deploy Center:

http://www.thechannelinsider.com/article2/0,1759,1733078,00.asp

I cannot imagine using Ghosted images for server deployment, however.

 

[sct77]

Try RIS with unattend. Unattend and sysprep can be configured in many ways. Best part it is free.

 

[YukimuraSonada]

The solution you go with is going to need to reflect your needs.

OPTION 1) GHOST: If you choose Ghost do keep in mind how physically similar the machines need to be for it to work. Also remember how much your licensing is going to run. My company was looking into buying Enough Ghost licenses for all 400 of our machines. The price tag there was around $5,000.00 for the new Ghost Solutions Suite. Ghost will be mainly utilized via a Multicast session (or GhostCast). You main hinderance is going to be that whatever VLAN you Multicast on, you'll bring down that entire VLAN for the duration of the Multicast. This could be anywhere from 2 - 30 minutes depending on the size of the image you're going to use.

However if your pockets are not deep and your hardware is all identical AND you can stand around 15 minutes of down time in part of your network Ghost is your way to go. Very little administrative overhead. And you can delegate it to your lackeys without fear of them screwing it up (too badly).

Additionally if you know how to use Setup Manager and Sysprep you can have many many machines deployed and set up within half an hour.....VERY effective.

OPTION 2) RIS (Remote Installation Service) - a wonderful way with which Microsoft is trying to suck the wind from Symantec's sails. This method os prone to errors (such as not working...and how do you find out it's not working? After you've spent 5 hours setting everything up, try it, and it all goes to hell). RIS requires AD (either 2000 or 2003) and DNS to running somewhere in your environment. There's a good <> $5,000 in equipmnet and licensing alone. RIS can be hard to setup and you virtually have to read it straight from a 70-270/70-290 book. Not to mention it's only going to work with certain client OS's (i.e. 2Kpro and XPPRO). Not many corporations that I know of would choose RIS over Ghost. RIS can do what's called RipREP which is very similar to Ghosting using a dedicated partition on teh RIS Server. It will use a Single Instance Store to facilitate faster Deployment times. The benefit of RIS over Ghost? It won't beat the crap out of your network with Multicasts and you don't have set up each little image. I used this a bunch on our NT 4.0 servers when I was in the Navy. A single image could take up to 10 hours to complete.

OPTION 3) Use something like Altiris of LanDESK. These products loom over Ghost or RIS as far as cost goes. However, their effective deployment capabilities are far greater and only a small part of what these products have to offer. They are both extremely powerful CMS suites (Client Management System) and are designed to do amazing things through WMI. Ask me about those features in another post. These guys both have RIS-like /Ghost-like capabilities. Including the ability to dissect images for different hardware.

Let's say for instance I have 10 machines. They're all different models of Dell. I have 10 different nics. Could I image them all at once with Ghost? No. Why? Because the image you are pushing is tailored only to one kind of nic and will only support 1 of the 10. Altiris and LanDESK will let you make a shared folder somewhere on you network containing all 10 drivers. You can then tell the image to intelligently pick out the appropriate drivers for the machines it's being used on. You can add and/or remove programs from images without having to redo the whole darned thing.

What's the price tag look like:

Ghost for 400 licenses : around $5,000
Altiris or LanDesk for 400 licenses: around $30,000

do you get the bang for you buck? Hell yess.

YukimuraSonada@gmail.com

 

[CoreyWilson]

Thanks all for the assistance.

I actually managed to dig up a copy of PowerQuest's deploy centre 5 which serves my need for the necessity of being able to reconize netware files systems and LFS.

For the user who said they can imagine ghosting server's....if you supported an environment of over 300 servers as is the case in my environment you would be thinking a little differently. besides a base image is the same for all servers, configuration comes later and is unique, but imaging that initial baseline config saves nearly three hours of repetetive build time.

Thanks again for your help all.