Opinions on Ghosting Citrix... 1

[MattWray]

I am pretty new with Citrix.
That being said, what are some experiences with Ghost and Citrix?
We have 3 Citrix servers. From the Install, they have not been too trustworthy. I would like to reload them one at a time, so I know what is in them and what was done (we had a third party do the install). One of my bosses does not like this idea. He would like to get one of the servers running good and ghost it back onto the others. This doesn't sound, to me, like it would work.
I've read that they shouldn't be part of a Domain, due to SIDs and that they shouldn't have any published Apps.
My thought is to get another server, do a clean load, and then use this as the Ghost image.
Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

 

[balage0]

if you have a server with mirrored drives, then maybe you can remove one from the mirror set, and use it for create another one.
Before the things, you can create a new HW profile without network, and disable SNMP, Networking service on the server. Then you can ghost, or remove the HDD and build a new server.

The choice is depend on your server how equivalent with eachother.
Balazs

 

[BTP]

I have used ghost to clone servers, and it works quite successfully, however you need GHOSTWALKER to change the SIDS of each server.

Ghosting works best if all your hardware is IDENTICAL! that is, cards in the same slots and everything.

Build your base image with no IP addresses, No published applications, no metaframe licences etc. (or build it as a normal server, but dont forget to remove these things before you get your ghost clone.)

also remember use "ghost -NTIL" cant remember what it does off the top of my head, but it made the cloning process work for me after some initial hitches.

Save the ghost image, burn the image to a CD and you are away.

When you put the image onto another server, remember to ghostwalk it to change the SID. Then enter in as local admin and set everything back up.

BEWARE tho, I've seen funnies when cloning like this, just peculiarities that can be fixed like the ICA task bar not displaying properly, easily fixed by copying across reg entries from an already working server.

Not a perfect method of cloning but effective.

hope this helps,
BTP

 

[MattWray]

Thank you both!

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

 

[BeerGood]

Just my $0.02 - you can use ghost/powerquest/etc to clone a running Citrix server, but on top of what you need to do when preparing the server for imaging (eg running sysprep) there are a number of things you will need to do after restoring the image. For example, you shouldn't image the first server in the farm as it will probably have the data store on it (assuming you aren't using a SQL server). So generally people image the second server in a farm. For further details, go to

http://www.citrix.com

and check out CTX18194 "Imaging MetaFrame XP Using Ghost 6.5.1"

Personally, with a three server farm, I would setup one base operating system server with all your standard config settings correct and image it *before* installing Citrix.

To image the server, you can use the GhostWalker utility but I personally just use sysprep to remove much of the unique information on the donor computer’s operating system. For Windows 2000, the required SysPrep.exe and setupcl.exe files are located at \support\tools\deploy.cab on the Microsoft install CD. Both of these files need to be copied to the C:\SysPrep folder. (Important: As you noted, Microsoft strongly recommends that computers that will be prepared using SysPrep should not be members of domains, but rather should be members of workgroups.) Then - assuming the server is setup as you wish - open up a command prompt then go to the sysprep directory and run sysprep.exe. The unique info will be wiped and the server shut down. Now use ghost to image the server. Note - do NOT let the donor computer actually start to run off the hard drive otherwise you will need to run sysprep again.

I would then use that image to create the servers (and of course you could use that image for other purposes as well) and then manually create the new farm and install Citrix on the boxes. Adding/installing new Citrix servers to a farm is very quick and hard to get wrong. Manually modifying text files etc after restoring an imaged Citrix server is "fraught with danger" if you don't do it all the time.....

After you have setup the farm, you might want to image each of the servers to create a backup of the things you can restore any of them at a later date should you need to.

Cheers

 

[MattWray]

Thanks BeerGood!

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com